5
Five Circles of Influence
The way to liberation is to allow the invasiveness of the journey or process. To become a leader worth following you must focus on every area of your life and that is usually the most difficult thing to do. Becoming a person worthy of following means that you must look inward into the mirror and make significant changes in areas that you didn’t think you would need to. It is a hard journey, which is why so many leaders stay at the lower levels. —Pattye Moore, Chairman of the Board, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers and former President, Sonic To become a 100X leader—a person worth following—you must change the patterns that come from your default tendencies as you acclimate to higher levels of leading and change your patterns of abdication, domination, or protection to move to liberation. This must occur in every circle of life, not just at work. Geologically, the depth of the valley defines the height of the mountain. If you want to go high, you must first go deep. If you want to go high, you must first go deep. When most people think about getting better at leading people they normally think about leading people at work. And yet, we have found that if you don’t include self-leadership or family leadership then you will never truly fulfill your true potential or function at the higher levels of influence. In the Industrial Age, before the digital revolution, the mindset of the leader was far more compartmentalized than it is today. What you did at home didn’t affect your ability to lead at work. In the digital world that is not the same, since social media and technology have encroached into every area of our lives. People are now looking for leaders who are authentic and genuinely model integrity and consistency in every area. It is almost impossible not to remain connected to the world at large all day, multitasking while seeing news of an old college friend or receiving texts from your spouse or kids while working. This connectedness forces us to be nimble as we are constantly dealing with issues in all the five circles of influence: self, family, team, organization, and community. Figure 5.1 shows a simple, but powerful tool we use to liberate others. Figure 5.1 The Five Circles of Influence Source: © Pub House/GiANT Worldwide. Influence is an inside-out game. You must look inward before leading outward. This issue is precisely why we have so many ineffective leaders in the world. They are trying to lead from the team and organization circles but are woefully inept when it comes to leading at the self and family circles. The unaware leader doesn’t understand that they need to address these areas if they want to be an authentic 100X leader in this age. We constantly deal with leaders who are achievers and are most driven to excel at work. It is in the team or organization circle where they also receive most of their rewards, so they tend to stay focused on these circles of influence instead of the more personal areas. However, if the self and family circles are ignored, the tendency to become unstable in crisis goes up dramatically. They are seen as less than authentic leaders. The key is to focus on all five circles of influence. On a mountain, everything must be intentional. Life depends on it. The Sherpa are constantly thinking ahead, observing those they are leading up the mountain and understanding their own strength in order to succeed and keep everyone safe along the way. This is intentional leadership. Accidental living is living by chance, unintentionally. It is hoping for things just to work out but not doing anything to make it occur. Accidental leadership is similar. “We hope people just do their job, that’s why we hired them, right?” This laissez-faire approach to life is easier in the front end but has potentially dangerous consequences. Intentional living and leading are much harder up front but will produce much better outcomes in the long run. Therefore, the journey toward liberating leadership begins with intentionality. It’s rooted in a willingness to look in the mirror, or even let others hold up a mirror for you to see what it’s like to be on the other side of you. What is it like to be led by you? Loved by you? Live with you? What tendencies do you have that build others up or bring them down, and are those tendencies increasing or decreasing your influence with them? This sort of self-honesty is a challenge for everyone. It requires being secure in who you are and having the humility to commit to a process of uncovering your weaknesses. Our natural tendencies don’t really change but with intentionality, humility, and effort we can begin to have a choice between the default patterns of how we normally respond to a situation and what we actively choose to do or say instead. The best leaders are intentional about this process and invite others to help them see where they can improve. Our best description of the leaders who commit to this challenge, came from our friend Pat Lencioni, when he shared that they are humble, hungry, and smart.1 Humble enough to admit, “I really want to grow, and invite others to help me”; hungry because they decided, “I really don’t want to stay the way I am”; and smart enough to be able to learn and commit to that learning and growth over a period of time. Intentional leadership is not for the faint of heart. After all, accidental leadership is the definition of default mode. It’s easy, it’s reactionary, and it doesn’t require facing our weaknesses or embracing our learning opportunities. And it certainly doesn’t require inviting others to challenge us in that process. The truth is, most leadership fails because the leader is inconsistent or accidental, succumbing too easily to the whims of self-preservation and knee-jerk reactions. It would be like an accidental Sherpa on Mount Everest. Can you even imagine? Would anyone want to follow them up the mountain when they are responsible for placing ladders over crevasses or ropes up steep cliffs? No, we only want to follow an intentional and consistent Sherpa. When you become consistent, you display your health, both as a leader and a person. And when you become healthy, your influence grows dramatically. Then, you start winning because your influence wins. Your team starts winning as well as you grow to become a more cohesive team. You start feeling at peace with yourself and begin to trust one another. With that security comes confidence and humility, which makes people begin to respect you even more. That’s what it means to liberate and be liberated. Let’s start with the first circle of Self and then work our way out as we attempt to mash up the Support-Challenge Matrix (from Chapter 2) with the Five Circles of Influence and ask yourself the following: Who are you to yourself? Do you dominate yourself? Do you protect or abdicate? Or do you tend to liberate yourself? All of us have an inner voice. Some of us speak positively about ourselves, while many speak horrible things about themselves: “You really have no idea what you’re talking about.” “No one wants to listen to you.” “You’re not a very good parent.” “You are never going to get fit, you just don’t have what it takes.” As we wrote this book, we studied in depth the mental preparation of extreme climbers and the Sherpa in particular. It was clear that the Sherpa view climbing differently than their clients, who see climbing as something to check off their bucket list. The Sherpa conversely are climbing in reverence of the living Mount Everest, which they call Chomolungma, which means “mother of the world,” while working to keep those they lead healthy and safe. To do this well, the Sherpa must think positively about themselves and eliminate any negatives. Here is what a few Sherpa shared about leading themselves in their interview with researcher, Kate O’Keefe:2 For some of you, overcoming the negative is the biggest barrier to climbing the mountain. You must liberate yourself. No more domination! No more overchallenge and undersupport. What would it look like if you spoke positively about yourself by showing yourself grace while still being accountable to being the best you can be? For some of you it is time to increase the challenge as you have been giving yourself too much support. “Oh, it’s okay, you deserve it; you have been working so hard,” as you allow yourself to indulge in one more of this or that. It is such a fine line when it comes to our mental makeup, as our personality, past experiences, beliefs, and influences of others shape much of our mental makeup. Some people have given up, whereas some give themselves too much slack, and others are taskmasters to themselves. To liberate is to give freedom. Our minds produce the actions that come from our hearts. Therefore, as people trying to be helpful or successful we must start the inside journey first in the way we treat and think about ourselves. This is in no way selfish, but it rather bolsters the simple idea—you can’t give what you don’t possess. If you want to help others you must be healthy first. The airlines demonstrate this well before every flight: “In the event of an emergency place the oxygen mask on yourself first before helping the person next to you.” Why? Because if you are not breathing you can’t help others breathe. Family, in whatever form that is to you, is vital in all our lives. The reason it is so important is that those closest to us can either help us become more effective or they can distract us from becoming our best. Family can be a blessing to the soul or, at worst, a thorn in the side—usually due to neglect or abdication or historical issues. Some leaders spend all their time and attention on other parts of their lives (often team or organization), assuming that family is the spouse’s responsibility. If the family is ignored, however, because of accidental living, the ramifications will be unfortunate and long term. This leader, who asked to be anonymous shares his reality here: I don’t know what to say. I am torn. My desire is to liberate my family, but I am constantly dealing with a situation where I don’t feel alive at home. I think my years of abdicating at home has created lower expectations of my wife and myself to our future together. I have been accidental and I know it and now I am suffering the consequences and I don’t know what to do. Therefore, I tend to dominate at times, protect at other times, and end up abdicating. I don’t know how to liberate at this point in our marriage. In the family circle, an experienced Sherpa is intentional. She or he uses support and challenge consistently, usually in different ways than they might at work. Here is how one client brought the process of liberation to her family: In my parenting I realized I swing from Protecting to Dominating in the way I lead my kids. In an effort to make my 16-year-old behave and perform at a top level I realized I am probably giving too much challenge and sharing high expectations in my tone with too little support. In fact, I don’t know exactly how to support him. I am using the Support-Challenge Matrix to help me learn how to help get my son to the next level. —Molly Holm, Owner and Chief Creative Officer at Glory Some of us might tend to dominate our spouses or children, and others may tend to protect family or close friends. Whichever it is, we all have patterns, and if we understand them, we can begin to alter them positively. In much of our work with highly driven, ambitious leaders, we find that abdication is the norm when it comes to families. What would happen for your family if you chose to liberate them, to calibrate high support as you fight for their highest possible good? What would help them? Have you tried asking? Family can be the most difficult area to liberate because we are dealing with kids of differing ages and maturity levels, and we are often trying to co-parent with someone else who has their own tendencies and patterns. For some, the real issue is that one spouse might not have the positional authority at home as they do at work, where hierarchies are clearer. In contrast, at home it is supposed to be a partnership, but it only works if you take the time to truly understand what it looks like to liberate your spouse. Scott Cornelius, a husband and dad living in San Francisco, explains his tendency and difficulty in being consistent as a parent: I realize now that I was primarily protecting my family. But now I’ve learned how to liberate and I’ve seen tangible breakthroughs to celebrate. As parents, we want nothing but success and happiness for our kids. I literally wanted them to experience nothing but rainbows and unicorns. However, through the Support-Challenge Matrix I am reminded of the importance of both rainbows and valleys. It is important for my kids to experience both these honestly and that I don’t shelter them from their consequences or criticism. True growth and liberation requires both support and challenge. That is what a Sherpa does in the family circle. They liberate their children to live through real highs and lows, teaching them how to rise to challenges and move on from failures, while supporting and nurturing them. You may have already thought about your tendencies of support and challenge as they relate to your team because of the previous chapter, but we want you to go deeper. A team could be any group of people working on a common goal. Our goal for you is for you to become consistent in your support and challenge and let’s admit it, some teammates cause us to want to protect or abdicate or dominate. The reality is that a different calibration is required for each person on your team. People are difficult and so is consistent leadership. Gavin Loftus, an executive living in the UK, says it this way: Hindsight is a wonderfully humbling thing. Our business was growing rapidly, with all the challenges that come with it. There was always an issue to address, a problem to solve or a project to deliver and my team was under pressure. My default position when a problem came up was “Give it here, I’ll fix it.” Things did get sorted out, but I would spend my days firefighting rather than investing and planning for the future. I thought I was helping my team out. I thought that’s what good leaders did. The Support-Challenge Matrix helped me see that I was protecting my people. I had my team’s interests at heart but in shielding them by taking the work myself, I wasn’t giving them the opportunity to step up to the challenge. By being a Protector, I was shortsighted, and I paid the cost. It wasn’t long until I burnt out. My GiANT Sherpas helped me to see that a good leader balances support with challenge. I learnt the difference between supporting someone and doing it for him or her! I’ve found it much easier to bring challenge with this simple tool to work from. Now, we have more people who can take ownership of projects and overcome challenges themselves. We are able to grow more, and the business is in a much healthier place than it was when I was trying to do everything myself. As I said, hindsight is a wonderfully humbling thing. Teams must be led by people who can properly support and challenge their people to perform at higher levels. Paula Tulley is the Regional Commercial and Marketing Lead, PEH Europe at Pfizer. After going through our one-year XCore program she discusses her learning inside her organization: I realized that inside my organization I was often in the Liberate quadrant, which was comforting to see and yet I also realized that at times I became accidental and started to protect more than liberate. My breakthrough has been realizing that in tough times, as a leader, I need to communicate my expectations more clearly. These practical tools helped me become much more intentional with my language which helps with my leadership throughout the organization. Inside my organization I strive to be clear but fair … what more can anyone ask? Organizations are made up of subcultures—teams with the healthiest subcultures are normally tied to the healthiest organizations. If team leaders are deliberate in the way they lead, then they will receive the results of great teams, healthy groups of people fighting for the highest possible good of one another. Although we talk about this in depth in a later chapter, it is important to understand that the strength of a team—and thus, the organization—lies in the strength of team leaders leading well in their subculture. The community circle consists of community inside neighborhoods, associations, churches, book clubs, and groups of all different shapes and sizes. How you lead in this circle could affect your reputation and influence it in big ways. My (Jeremie’s) community has changed dramatically over the past few years. In a five-year window our community shifted three distinct times—from Atlanta to London to Oklahoma City. With each move, we changed our community. As we moved back to our hometown for our kids’ high school we decided to build a community in the form of an actual neighborhood called the Prairie at Post. Although we have been very intentional in our new development, we completely abdicated in our current neighborhood, while we waited for the new. We thought we would only live in this current neighborhood for a year and therefore we didn’t build deep roots because of the upcoming move. The issue for my wife and me was that we have been building a liberating community elsewhere, while abdicating in our current location, which is something we are trying to change. To each of us, community can mean different things. It is important to realize the impact that each of you have or could have within your communities, whether through a nonprofit, neighborhood, or school association or a church or different group. If you take the Support-Challenge Matrix and review it against the Five Circles of Influence, you will have the chance to see a snapshot of your behaviors in each circle of influence in the current moment. The joy of this process is that you can change your behavior almost overnight if you choose to become intentional rather than accidental. This will allow you to reach the next level, which you may have doubted was possible. It is a process you can repeat regularly. To go through this exercise, you must honestly assess what your actions tend to be in each circle (see Figure 5.2) and color-code them accordingly. Liberating is green; dominating is red; abdicating is gray; and protecting is yellow. What are you to yourself? Your family? Your team and your organization? What about your community? Figure 5.2 Five Circles of Influence Source: © Pub House/GiANT Worldwide. When you see what you tend to do in each circle it should or could have a profound effect on the way you support or lead those closest to you. Our goal as your Sherpa is to help you get rid of your incongruence and become more aligned as you live and lead. Diana Bocaneala, Head of People Development and Recruitment at Endava CE in Romania, summarizes the journey of liberation like this: I realize now that I was primarily dominating my team, causing things to turn red. When I became aware of this I saw that the environment I created around myself was not one that would sustain my personal growth or that of the team. I decided to strive to liberate the people I lead! As a result, I’ve seen team members embracing the challenge I bring to them with the confidence that I will be there for them and support them to breakthrough. I’ve seen good people becoming great, now confident that they can do it too, they can conquer the mountains, and they do. In my family, though, I was primarily protecting them. I can’t express in words how painful this was for me to acknowledge that due to my behavior, I’ve created a culture of mistrust. For me it was a paradigm change. My husband went through some difficult moments and my attitude had been to protect him, take on the responsibility and overcome the issues by myself, thinking this was a way to show my love. When I realized what I had built and that actually to love and trust means to have the confidence that the one who you’ve chosen to be with forever has the capability, has the resources and skills to be and do more and better, made me rethink how I address the challenges and share the opportunity to serve and love with him. The last year was like our second honeymoon, after 11 years of marriage, we rediscovered each other. In my community I was abdicating. For a long time, I was not doing anything for the local community. It was easy to sit and judge that things were not happening the way they should. I realized that this was not the right attitude and if I wanted to change anything, I should start with myself and change my attitude. So I shared with the local youth group about what I’m doing in my company and offered to help. I started to work with them and help them to be liberating leaders for themselves and for the community they are part of and together, as I’m writing this, we are building a strategy for the community youth and I’m sure that great results will come in the upcoming years. We have hopefully given you some food for thought. You may even be feeling a little challenged or consciously incompetent in a few areas. Here are some answers to common questions we are asked at this stage, from our Liberator Podcast and during consulting sessions to help you integrate this in to your real life: The first time I saw the Support-Challenge Matrix I immediately realized that I am primarily a Dominator in most of my circles of influence. Some, like my immediate team, who I felt truly knew the real me, understood that the high challenge I shared was not only calibrated with some support for them, but also directed mostly internally—at myself. However, when I shared this same level of expectation with others in my Organization circle that I didn’t see or work with every day, it was received as fear-inducing manipulation, as self-promotion and not supportive of the overall empowerment of the organization. In an “aha” moment I realized that I was constantly undermining my influence and creating a culture of fear. I thought I was being helpful by taking some weight off others’ shoulders, solving their problems, getting their jobs done, boldly sharing my ideas of how to improve something, and not being afraid to ask the difficult questions or make the difficult decisions. I thought I was bringing value to the Organization and was showing I cared. While all those things I mention ARE of value, I learned that you could be right and wrong at the same time when doing any of them! I have learned to Liberate not by lowering my challenge, but increasing my support. Now I truly allow people in my organization to participate in solving the problems, I let others take the credit for accomplishments, leave room for them to share ideas and I don’t jump to the solution first. I realized that I was overprotecting my staff after going through the 100X journey. As CEO, I had created a team that would ride through fire by my side but that had become comfortable with the day to day, reducing the chance of growth and opportunity. After practicing bringing more challenge and learning to liberate, I now have staff who believe they can achieve more than ever before. I also have a team who feels that they are fairly treated and do not carry the weight of others. I am still learning how to fight commensurate to the way I serve so that I can become consistent long term with those I lead. —Mark Lewington, CEO, CTS Systems As a Sherpa for you, our greatest desire is that you would become intentional and consistent in your ability to function in 100% health and learn how to liberate others more often each day in each circle of influence. If you do this you will eventually receive the rewards that all leaders value most—honor, respect, and lasting influence. The 100X journey takes time. Some of you will take much longer on 100% health, while some of you are ready for the X of multiplication. In the next chapter, we will explore how to develop others to get them to the higher levels.
Five Circles of Influence
Intentional versus Accidental
The Path to Liberating Leadership
Intentionality Leads to Consistency
The Self Circle
The Family Circle
The Team Circle
The Organization Circle
The Community Circle
Support Challenge plus Five Circles Color Code Test
Putting It All Together
Notes