he showed up in meetings, how he negotiated project changes with his teammates—anything I saw that felt connected to the larger theme. And I held him accountable when he slid back into his old pattern of being too agreeable, instead of speaking his mind and taking the risk to innovate when he saw a better way.
“Do you have a minute?” he said.
“Sure, come on in.”
“Hey, so I don’t know how to say this, but I just want to say thank you.” (He wasn’t someone who had an easy time talking about himself.) “I know you’re busy and have a lot on your plate but you gave me something these past few months that I’ll never forget—an experience of myself out in the world—that I didn’t know I was missing. And it’s making a big difference at home too.”
“Really?” I replied. “That’s so great to hear. I don’t want to put you on the spot but I’d love to hear a little more about it if you’re up for sharing.”
“Well, my two boys just look at me differently now. I don’t know what other words to use but I can see it in their eyes, I’m just more there. Do you know what I mean?”
He had done the real work of changing. He took the feedback I’d given him along the way. He broke the pattern, one moment at a time, of undermining his own creativity and entrepreneurial spirit by worrying too much about ruffling other people’s feathers.
The conversation was different with each person. Sometimes it was simply having a new experience of what it was like to have a boss, someone who listened, who cared, and who genuinely wanted to help.
I kept going. Over time I forgave myself for the leadership sins of my past. I did whatever I could, with everyone I could, to hold up my end of the bargain and let them make their own choices about whether they wanted to change. I learned that a manager can foster the personal growth of each person on their team by giving direct and granular feedback about the way they relate with their work, and by giving them the choice to act—or not act—on that feedback in their own way. That’s what Good Authority is all about.
The more I saw what was missing from my own approach the more I saw the same gap in the coaching and consulting industry that I was a part of. Everyone is talking about accountability but nobody is defining what it really means, and, more importantly, breaking it down into a set of skills that people can learn and apply. The reason nobody is teaching it is because it doesn’t fit into neat boxes. It’s messy. It’s personal. It’s about who we think we are, who we find out we are when we get into relationships with other people, and the long and winding road that it takes to close the gap between the two. This discovery was also bringing me to the end of my own long and winding road, the one I started all those years before when I left the law firm in New York. I had finally closed the gap in my life between the personal me and the professional me, which never should have been there in the first place.
When I did, that voice started stirring in me again, telling me it was time to move on. I saw the potential in those moments, in the possibility that the line we’ve been keeping between personal and professional growth—the line I was keeping in myself all those years—was not only artificial, but the very thing preventing us from creating the cultures we really want. It was time for me to take the risk, to create a platform for these ideas and see what would happen. That integration of personal and professional growth has become my life’s work. It’s what we teach at refound.com and it’s what the rest of this book is about.
Leaving my team was hard. But in the Spring of 2015 I decided that it was time for me to go out on my own. I wondered whether I could make a business out of doing just this one thing: If I could create a new kind of consultancy, a mentoring company of sorts, to teach others to apply these ideas for themselves. With the incredible curiosity and passion of a small group of clients who were there with us at the beginning, we were off.
I wrote this book to share with you the ideas—both the philosophical framework and the tactical skills—that our clients are using to change things where they work. They are people just like you: team leaders, senior managers, and C-level executives—consultants and coaches too. In the pages to come you’ll be hearing from them through stories and dialogues that will help you see how much power you have to change the world where you work, no matter where on the org chart you sit.
You’ll find all the free Good Authority tools and resources at refound.com/resources
This is not a rulebook, and it doesn’t describe a linear process. It offers a new management theory and a set of skills you can test out, and decide for yourself if they work. It’s a way of leading and managing a team that applies no matter what industry you’re in, no matter how big or small your team. Take the time to go in order if you can. Feel free to skip ahead and come back if one of the later chapters jumps out at you. I’ll meet you in the middle.
Good Authority
We teach best what we
most need to learn.
—Richard Bach
When I was eleven years old I went with my mother to work for the day. Her office was a college classroom. She was a psychology professor at a local university. As fate would have it, on that particular day, the discussion turned to a question that cut to the heart of why men do the things they do. “Why is it,” she asked the room full of undergraduates “that, even when they’re lost, men won’t ask for directions?”
The class chuckled. They gave it their best shot. Of course, I thought I had a better answer. I tightened my grip on my Aquaman lunchbox to bolster my confidence. I raised my hand and waited for her to notice. Not surprisingly, she did. “Well,” I said to warm myself up, “the reason men don’t ask for directions is so … that way … when they figure it out they get to be the hero.” As you can imagine, I’ve never lived that one down.
As much mileage as it got as a family anecdote over the years, there was something else going on there. There were at least three things I see now in the naive words of that eleven-year-old boy. The first was that I was expressing a belief about authority, about what I thought it means to be of value to others, that would become my life’s work three decades later. The second was that this phenomenon had nothing to do with gender. In the work I do every day with our clients, I see female leaders and managers struggle with it just as much as us menfolk. And the third—what was obvious to my mother and probably everyone else in the room—was that I was talking about myself.
The belief many of us have as we try to figure out what it means to truly lead a team of people is this: What makes us valuable, what gives us authority and credibility in the eyes of others, is our ability to solve problems and reach goals. The theory of this book is that the opposite is true. That the highest form of leadership, the most value you can add—to your team, your organizations, and to the world around you—is to develop the strength to not give people the answers. Rather, your job is to create a space where they can discover the answers for themselves, where you become a resource for them to reach their destination. If you make the pivot, you’ll find that 90 percent of the symptoms and struggles that overwhelm your day right now will start to disappear.
That’s what it means to be a Good Authority. It’s about becoming a true mentor to the people on your team. And I’ll argue that solving your team’s problems for them is
