#54: MPWR Greatest Hits: The Leadership Principles That Change Everything

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Eric:  Welcome to the Empower Podcast. I'm your host, Eric Pfeiffer, CEO of Empower. Coaching leadership isn't about titles or positions. It's actually about the influence and impact we have on our environments. This is where we get to learn how to operate well under pressure, lead with confidence and drive meaningful results.

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You can have all the money, success, and status in the world and still feel empty. Why? Because leadership that only invests in profits eventually runs out of purpose. And that's why we teach the five capitals tool. We tend to value what we measure. Until we, or sorry, we measure what we value  until we value what we measure.

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Now we have to choose what we want that influence to be. Keep within human beings, there is a desire to wanna connect with or reconnect with our sense of significance and purpose. Why am I here and what am I fighting for?  Trust broke down. Communication broke down. So relational capital is basically measured through friends and family, the quality of those relationships such that we can make withdrawals because of the deposits.

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What are they concerned about? Their relationships of their life, their legacy that they're leaving to their kids, their spouse, their extended family to their business, whatever it  is, right? And I think that what's happened is in our culture. We have primarily thought of this through the lens of finances, and I think we need to start broadening that to think through all five of of these bank accounts.

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This is a  conversation about how do we envision the life that we wanna fight for, and then how do we invest strategically toward that? And what I tell people is we need to, on a regular basis, I would say monthly is a great rhythm, or every three months, once a quarter is we need to do an audit on these five bank accounts.

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Because they traded, they sacrificed the relationships of their life on the alberg. More money or acquire more education. Will we ask people the prevailing culture of the United States,  if you asked people generally to prioritize this list from top to bottom, which capitals are more valuable than the next?

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And as we go through our days, the more we pay attention to these five capitals, the more we reflect on these, the more we realize that all of life is really just an investment strategy. We have to  set a clear vision for what it is that we want, and then we can reverse engineer and ask the question, what would be my investment strategy?

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There's nothing that we're striving for as a team, so I might as well just do the bare  minimum.

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We need challenge if we're gonna move outside of our comfort zone and have an opportunity to grow or develop. And imagine in that top right quadrant where there's. High support and high challenge. We call this the Empowered Quadrant because it represents a  kind of culture where people are experiencing the appropriate amount of high expectations, responsibility, accountability, but they're also receiving the necessary support, encouragement, resourcing.

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Or maybe it leads to a sense of entitlement, right? Everything's gonna be done for me. I don't have to lift a hand, a finger, other people. It becomes a complacent environment where people are no longer growing because they just feel really comfortable and it's easier to just stay status  quo. Now, let's imagine the opposite, the lower right quadrant where you have a high degree of challenge, but very low support.

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The natural human default without. Intentional  support and challenge, yeah. Is for people to actually devolve back into that lower left quadrant where they feel bored, apathetic, disinterested, unmotivated, and leaders wonder, why are people moving all the time to new jobs? Why is there so much turnover? Why can't we keep it?

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Eric: Creating an environment for them as human beings where they feel seen, heard, and valued, or they feel like they have an opportunity to become a better version of  themself.

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Eric: Leaders  don't make excuses. They take ownership, but most people don't start there when things go wrong.

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A difficult bit of news that we found out. It could be the look that somebody gives us that we feel threatened by. We feel unsafe. And the natural human instinct is to wanna  regain a sense of safety and security. And for us as human beings, we just have this natural propensity. To wanna blame the world, to wanna blame circumstances, to wanna blame people rather than taking personal responsibility.

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Eric: To be human is to get triggered, and the trigger is any experience, big, small, positive, negative, that disrupts us mentally, emotionally, and physically. The whole journey toward personal responsibility is recognizing they can't really control anything. The world around me have control over one thing, and that is my  attitude and my behavior.

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Oftentimes in this scenario, we spend 80% of our energy trying to control the environment, other people, the situation around us, when  in fact it's that 20%. It's if we can learn to control our own responses, if we can decide that we aren't a victim or at the mercy of things that are going on around us.

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It was immediately finger pointing, blaming, projecting responsibility, throwing people under the bus, looking for a scapegoat, like instead of us playing the victim of villain, instead of us staying on that hijacked path, what if we all just took 30 seconds to think to ourselves? What would it look like for me to take  100% personal responsibility for my part in this experience?

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What would it look like for me to serve my  environment, to look out for the best interest of all parties involved, rather than just trying to save my own neck? And that became, for me, this powerful analogy for me as a leader. I wanna be the kind of leader that under increasing pressure. When everybody else is kinda folding under that pressure, everybody else is kinda defaulting to these negative attitudes and neighbors that I still have the stamina and the endurance to be able to bring the best version of me to that situation

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Eric: This tool, the Kairos Circle, directly addresses those temptations. Gives us a simple pathway to practice personal responsibility and to leverage our best version of ourself, our intelligence, our composure, to be able to navigate these different decisions, to give us the best outcomes that we  can. And I would say that is one of the greatest advantages to learning this tool, this process, is because it gets us out of the mindset of simply surviving.

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That's really important because too often we wanna jump straight, like you said, to just reacting and to being a quick fixture

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We also need partners who aren't afraid to hold our feet to the fire. Hey, you said you were gonna do X, Y, or Z. Are you doing it? If not, why not? And what do we need to do about it? That transformation is within reach for us, for our teams, for our organizations, if we know how to leverage this  process. The Cairo Circle.

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Dawn:  Yeah.

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And so in doing that, we get in trouble. But here's what I tell people. The circle is not meant to teach people something they'd never done before. It's actually to remind us. Of how to make  sure that we're operating as the best version of ourself, especially under a lot of pressure and what's in the best interest of the individuals is in the best interest of the company.

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It sure reveals one thing more than anything else. Your emotional intelligence,  you've seen it before. One leader stays calm and focused in the midst of the chaos while another panics lashes out or shuts down the difference. Emotional intelligence or what we like to call e eq, and here's the hard truth, if you cannot manage.

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Eric: If we're losing our minds and we're overreacting and we're throwing an adult tantrum, which is what I like to call it, which by  the way, I have thrown plenty in my life and probably will continue at times.

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Dawn: We see the swan  just so gracefully gliding across the water. It looks effortless, and what we don't see is that underneath the water, those little swan feet are palling for all it's worth.

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Like I have stopped paying attention to those lights  altogether, and that's what our own internal life can be like. We just are blind to it

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We need to practice three  things in those areas where we're losing. Push number one is brutal honesty. We need to be brutally honest about not only what's going on for us internally, but our impact on the environment. Self-love is not about excusing or giving yourself a pass. It's about giving yourself permission to forgive yourself for those indiscretions, those kinda less than great moments in our behaviors, and to commit ourselves to saying, how do I get better?

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Visit our website@mpwcoaching.com and follow us on socials for daily leadership insights. And remember,  be the leader you wanna follow. See you next time.