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No Bullsh!t Leadership
Paying the Price of Leadership: 4 Hard Truths Every Leader Must Accept
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When we started this podcast, we had to figure out a lot of it on our own, which was pretty daunting at times. When you're starting off with something new, it seems like your to do list just keeps growing and it can begin to consume every waking moment. Finding the right tool that helps you out and simplifies everything can be a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names to brands that are just getting started. Shopify is also packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. Get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into With Shopify, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com selling leadership go to shopify.com leadership there are three hidden costs of leadership that nobody warns you about. Everyone loves talking about the upside of leadership Status, money, influence. But nobody talks about what it costs. And unless you're willing to pay that price, leadership is always going to feel difficult and lonely. In this episode, I give you four invaluable tips to make it easier for you to pay that price.
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Welcome to the no Bullshit Leadership podc. In a world where knowledge has become a commodity, this podcast is designed to give you something more access to the experience of a successful CEO who has already walked the path. So join your host, Martin Moore, who will unlock and bring to life your own leadership experiences and accelerate your journey to leadership excellence.
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Hey there and welcome to episode 385 of the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. This week's episode, Paying the Price of Leadership I'm following a bit of an American football theme this week. In Monday's Moments, episode I recounted the story of an NFL kicker who got the yips. He completely lost his confidence and simply couldn't perform when it mattered most. In this episode, I'm going to focus on a speech by the coach of the iconic Georgia Bulldogs football team, Kirby Smart. Smart talks about the three costs of leadership. No one really talks about them, but great leaders understand these costs and they're willing to accept them. The first cost is you will have to make hard decisions that negatively affect people you care about. The second cost is you will be disliked despite your best attempts to do the best for the most. And the third cost is you will be misunderstood and you won't always have the opportunity to defend yourself. So in this episode. For each of these costs, I'm going to interpret it for the business leadership context and give you some examples of how it generally plays out. Then I'm going to finish with a few tips for how to embrace the cost so that you willingly pay the price of leadership upfront rather than trying to bargain or avoid it. So let's get into it. Let's look at the first cost. You will have to make hard decisions that negatively affect the people you care about. Now, in the context of business, every time you make a tough call, this happens. By definition, you should care about all your people. That means caring enough about them to push them to be successful in their role, caring enough to help them grow, and caring enough to tell them the truth. And sometimes that will negatively affect them. Often it can make a decision that would otherwise be pretty straightforward appear to be very difficult. Let's look at a couple of common examples. There are a range of routine decisions that have to be made at every level, and every one of these decisions has winners and losers. The decision to promote the best person into a role will negatively affect the second best person whom you might respect, value and care about. Or you might decide that despite the fact that you have some really good people in your team, none of them is quite ready to step up to the next level and you bring someone in from the outside. Then there's the bigger decisions, like canning a project that's become commercially unviable when you know that people will lose their jobs, or the decision to outsource a function that's no longer core to the business, or to automate a manual process that was being done by some of your people. I once had a senior person working for me who was simply outstanding. She was two levels below me and her direct manager who reported to me as part of my executive leadership team advocated strongly for her. So as soon as the opportunity arose to test her at the next level up, I jumped on it, making her a direct report to me and part of the executive leadership team. She acted in that role for a number of months while I conducted a process to make the appointment permanent. I was slow rolling the process so that I had plenty of time to assess her readiness for that C level role. I worked really closely with her and I gave her frequent and targeted feedback as I did with all my execs. The more time I spent with her, the higher I rated her and my respect for her increased every week. But despite that, I knew that she wasn't quite ready for the exec level role. I knew that in time she would be enormously successful. But not now. I wrestled with promoting her and seeing if she could grow into the role, but apart from the potential impact on the business, I knew that it wouldn't be in her best interests either. It would most likely damage her confidence, potentially setting her career back by years. So I made the decision to move her back to her previous level and bring in another executive from the outside. I made that decision knowing that it would negatively impact someone I cared about. Now, I'd like to tell you that this story ended well, and it would have, except that I completely cocked up the external hire by bringing in a complete dud. Now this would have felt like twisting the knife for the person I chose not to promote. But despite my recruitment screw up, it did turn out to be the right decision for the individual that I decided not to promote. When I ran into her a few years later after I'd moved from my role, she told me that while she didn't understand it at the time, it was the best thing that could have happened to her. She went away and worked on the areas that I was coaching her to develop. She'd grown in capability and confidence and had eventually been promoted to the executive level and she was hitting it out of the park. The second cost of leadership is you will be disliked despite your best attempts to do the best for the most now let's put this into context of business. Not everyone is going to like you by definition. I used to say at CS Energy that at least 5% of my people on any given day hated my guts for no apparent reason. But that's okay. You're not going to like everyone who works for you either. What you will have is is this annoying, incessant voice in your head telling you that you want people to like you. That voice is going to encourage you to not hold people to the standard that you've said you're setting for the team. It'll encourage you to let people work on things that they want to work on rather than the work that you know the company needs. This is why the mantra of all good leaders is respect before popularity. Lets just look at a couple of examples. The higher up you go, the less likely it is that you can please everyone. Just think about the number of stakeholders that you have to deal with as a CEO. First of all, there's your employees. They want to be looked after and they don't want to be asked to do anything unreasonable. And of course they want to be paid well. Then there's the leaders below you, they want to have the freedom to lead and to choose their own settings for how much performance pressure they bring onto their people. Then there's your shareholders. Well, they want you to make money by growing both dividends and long term company value. In other words, maximizing the total shareholder return. And of course there's the communities you operate in. And they want all the benefits of the economic growth that your company brings without any of the impacts or externalities that come with operating in their neighbourhood. And that list of stakeholders goes on. How likely is it that you could chart a course that would satisfy all of those competing interests? It's impossible and you will be disliked. So you'd better commit to doing the best for the most because at the end of the day, that's all you have, the knowledge that you were true to yourself and to the job that you were being paid to do. In a number of the executive roles that I took on, I had to implement widespread high impact culture change. The businesses were massively underperforming and fortunately I am most comfortable in a turnaround role. That's where I'm at my best and it's the situation most suited to my capabilities and style. But it means upheaval, it means disrupting the status quo. And I knew it was impossible to do this without disenfranchising the bulk of the frontline workforce. I was also disrupting every leader in the business by requiring them to lead differently. So in terms of being disliked, this was pretty much a sure thing. As a side note, if you think you're changing a culture and you're not meeting fierce pushback, passive aggressive resistance and even some outward animosity, then nothing's really changing. If the bulk of people accept it willingly, then you can bet your bottom dollar that nothing is really changing. No noise equals no change. But I digress. So I'm a big believer in the premise of a fair day's work for a fair day's pay. But in many of these companies, after years of entitlement, union militants and weak leaders turning a blind eye to individual behaviours, there is nothing fair about the relationship between the work and the pay. They had pretty decent conditions. One particular group of workers had a roster that scheduled them for on average around 34 hours a week and their average annual income was well over $250,000. Now, this was something I couldn't change. But with conditions as favourable as those, I at least expected them to take accountability for the outcomes that that they were supposed to be delivering. The pushback I got though, was bordering on the irrational. And they were going to fight any and every change to the death. I gotta say, I went through leaders faster than I had at any other point in my career. Even the shareholders and board weren't always in my corner because sometimes life got really uncomfortable for them. When I left that role, a long standing lieutenant who was there from the start said, but of course not to my face. I don't think anyone is going to miss Marty. Well, that was a sure sign that I had paid that price and done the job I needed to do. I did the best for the most because I wasn't afraid of being disliked. The third cost is you will be misunderstood and you won't always have the opportunity to defend yourself. Now, in the business context, often when you make a decision, there are many reasons why you can't explain how you arrived at that decision. Perhaps there's an individual privacy element. Perhaps you're contractually bound by something that's commercial in confidence. And quite often it's simply because you can't explain everything to everyone. If you did, you'd never get anything done. But in business, when your people don't have the full picture on something, they tend to fill in the gaps with their own narrative. They'll actually make things up to possibly explain your actions, and they'll even ascribe intent to those actions and ruminate about why you might have done something. So in leadership, you have to expect to be misunderstood. Now, one classic example of this is when you have to terminate an employee for misconduct. The company may reach a settlement with the individual to exit them from the business and agree to a set of conditions that each party signs up to. Commonly, these conditions would have clauses like non disclosure, that is neither party can talk about the details of the agreement. And also common in these situations is a non disparagement clause. So neither party can speak negatively about the other party. The individual may have done something that any reasonable person would consider to be unacceptable, but because you can't divulge exactly what happened, people will find it easy to fall into the narrative about the uncaring company terminating a hard working but helpless employee. You simply won't have the opportunity to defend that decision. And the rumour mill is going to wind up to fill in the gaps. One really big decision that I couldn't explain fully was the decision to terminate a large project that the company had been working on for several years. It was a renewable energy project that was initiated well before I arrived in the CEO role, but it was doomed from the start the financial modelling was to be kind fanciful. The spreadsheets should have been filed under F for fiction. The technology was highly speculative and the supplier of this technology, who was based in France, simply wasn't able to deliver on their commitments. But it was incredibly complex and to the naked eye things seemed to be going pretty well. Shit was getting built and visible progress was being made. There were also many high profile investors and stakeholders who wanted to see the project finished. Unfortunately, it was a dog and eventually I convinced the board and shareholders that terminating the project was the only sensible thing to do. But when the decision was finally approved, I knew that there was no way I could explain the rationale to everyone. For a start, the terms we struck with our French supplier to exit the project were commercial in confidence. Then there was the financial settlement with some of the investors. The only thing that was fully visible was the commentary in the annual report and the $70 million impairment that the company took on the project. So in the absence of me being able to explain the full story to all the stakeholders, there was a lot of speculation about why the decision was made. Even the media made up some of their own reasons for my decision, and my opportunity to explain or defend it was severely limited. Let's talk about how to pay the price. These three costs of leadership are going to be part of any role where you accept the challenge of leading other people. You will have to make hard decisions that negatively impact the people you care about. You will be disliked and you will be misunderstood. And you have to be willing to pay that price. This is a battle that you'll fight inside your own head and most people won't even know that you're wrestling with it. So I want to give you some mental drills that are going to push you in the right direction and make it easier for you to choose to pay the price of leadership. Here are my top four mental hacks. Number one, Focus on the result. Making difficult decisions, being disliked and being misunderstood are unavoidable consequences of leadership. The only thing you can control is the result. You're going to feel the pain no matter what. But if you can, focus on the result, doing the best for the most, as Kirby Smart says, you'll at least feel as though the pain is worth it. Number two, Be honest with yourself about your intent. Why are you making the decisions you're making and taking the actions you're choosing? Is it because they're the best choices for the team and the business? Or are you just following the path of least resistance? You'll gain strength from knowing in your heart of hearts that you're doing things for the right reasons. But your brain is a sophisticated rationalization engine and is going to try to convince you to not do anything that puts you at risk of not being liked and accepted. Being clear, honest and focused about your intent is going to build your strength and encourage you to pay the price of leadership. Number three, choose your mantras. I found that having a few mantras was really important to keep me on track. It's how I learned to push through any rationalization or weakness that might have tempted me to do the wrong things for the wrong reasons. If I thought a decision might be unpopular, I would use the mantra respect before popularity. If I had to make a high stakes decision that required boldness and potentially exposed me to reputational damage, my mantra was I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb if I chose to remove any non performers. My mantra was I refuse to penalise the many good people in my team just because one person's choosing not to perform. And my standard for all situations is I choose to do the right thing when it needs to be done just because it's right. Mantras like this are going to help you to focus on the necessity of the outcome, not the noise that the outcome generates. And finally, number four, consider the alternative. What type of leader do you want to be? What type of leader do you tell people that you are? The only alternative to making the best decision you can and paying the price of leadership is being a fraud. And that's something your brain can't talk you out of. You'll know deep down that that's who you are. And unless you're a sociopath, it's going to eat away at you. A hard part of leadership most often isn't the skill and capability aspect. It's the emotional and psychological impact on you and on others. Deciding to pay the price is an important step in the journey to leadership greatness. If you don't put that to bed early, then every single time you have to do something difficult, you're going to try to bargain with yourself. You'll find yourself agonizing over every single decision. So use those four mental hacks to get yourself in the right headspace. I can't promise you that it's always going to be easy, but I can promise you that it will always be worth it. If you decide to pay the price willingly, you'll be surprised how much easier leadership becomes. Alright, so that brings us to the end of episode 385. I really hope you enjoyed it. But as I'm sure you know, listening is easy, leading is hard. That's why we created Leadership beyond the Theory, our flagship program that turns insight into action and and action into results. This is where we unlock the secrets of elite leadership performance and give you the tools you need to reach the pinnacle of your career success. I look forward to next week's episode, how to connect better with your people. Until then, I know you'll take every opportunity you can to be a. No Bullshit.