222 - The Transformative Power of Empathetic Leadership with Legacy Leadership Institute's Madeleine MacRae

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show, and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Madeleine LePré, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the CEO and co-founder of Legacy Leadership Institute. And you've got a deep background in, in corporate leadership and now in leadership development. And we're here to learn from you. So welcome to the show.

I am delighted to be here. Thanks for having me, Doug.

Thanks, Madeline. So I'd like, I always like to start, my audience really wants to know more about you. So let's start with just backstory. Tell us a little bit about your background.

So I grew up in a super blue-collar neighborhood in the suburbs of Detroit in a home that my mom still lives in to this day. My dad would be with him if, if he— with her, if he hadn't passed on. So my parents still live in the same house that we were raised in, just a few minutes outside of the Detroit airport. Grew up in a staunchly blue-collar family. I never saw anyone who was an entrepreneur. I saw a couple people rise to leadership roles and mid-management roles in kind of government work or in engineering, but advanced math is not my jam, so it didn't, didn't really resonate with me very deeply. So when I emerged out of my schooling career with my BA in English literature, feeling very accomplished and ready to become an editor without one single slice of any experience. I boldly jumped into the land of small business and I just instantly fell in love with the gritty, tenacious entrepreneurial spirit. And ever since then, I've been hooked.

Huh. So you started Yeah, I have an English degree too from Dartmouth. That and a cup of coffee. It's more than a buck at Starbucks, right?

$5.

Whatever it is. Yeah. So you started working with small businesses right out of college.

I did. Yeah. So I actually was hired by a company that was just beginning pre-sales. It was a small startup manufacturer in the hurricane protection industry, right? In Florida. That makes sense.

Right.

Of course, I had in college, my philosophy was to jump around to a bunch of different departments and try different jobs out because I didn't really know the job market and I just wanted to expand some skills. And I got hired as an executive assistant for this small startup and they were pre-revenue. And when products started rolling in, they weren't having success selling it and they were starting to create some stress. And I'm just like a roll up your sleeves and get in there kind of person. So I self-educated on sales and I realized all this is talking to people and I got a gift of gab, so let's make it happen. And I started to sell and to do business development and I pretty quickly realized that I had an extreme talent for it. It was all small B2B sales, right? Small businesses, B2B selling. And that's how my career got started, right? I was made the sales director of one person, myself, and I directed that business. Right from zero to like $1.5 million in about 18 months. And it was a really fun journey and foray into business and took off from there.

So did you have, did you continue in doing in the sales work at moving from company to company or?

Well, I went from that company to working for myself immediately. My first little stint of entrepreneurial life, which scared the tarnation right out of me. But what happened was that I decided to leave that company for a variety of reasons. I moved from South Florida to Dallas, Texas, and I noticed that there were a lot of people in my industry I was still connected to. So that's motorization, hurricane protection, interior window treatments, and there was just lack of product representation. And so I went to a couple manufacturers that I knew and I said, hey, I, there's, this market is wide open. There's no competition here. There's nothing. So we can sell at a much higher price point. That'll give you space to pay me and I'll do all your business development and all your sales for you. And within a couple of months, I completely replaced my salary and I was building my own thing and I had really no idea that I was building a business, right? I was thinking about it as feed myself, pay my own bills. As many of us do. And what happened is that over a course of time, a large manufacturer who sells motors and controls, I was eroding their market and can't beat them, buy them. So they recruited me to come work for them. They're a big A brand, and that's how my corporate career got started. I left my own small business to go work for them. And to climb that corporate ladder, which I did in record time. I loved, and that's how that leadership and educational piece in that leadership and management role really got rocking and rolling in my career.

So you did, you don't have an MBA. You have basically all on-the-job experience, self-taught. What, in this big corporate job? Yeah. How far up the ladder did you, did you get?

I went as high as I could in North America.

Okay.

So it was a North American headquarters of a large multinational billion-dollar corporation, and they are the leading name in tubular motors and controls, which means a heck of a lot to a whole few people. And so their name is SOMFI Systems. They're a French publicly traded company, and I actually became part of the executive leadership team within 18 months. So I got a double promotion, promoted once and then promoted again. I was the youngest member of the executive leadership team and I got moved around to a couple different departments. And it was only after my second lateral move that I realized there's really nowhere higher for me to go. It's all lateral unless I move internationally. And so I went through the rigmarole of being pursuing an international move and my mentor was the CEO of the whole group. So that, that's a cool story how that happened. But when it all came down to it, I was very specific about I'd move anywhere in the world except for Asia because I don't speak the language and I don't read the language, and I felt very intimidated as a solo individual to go to a country where I had no context. And they ended up offering me a role in Shanghai. So I was like, oh my gosh, the mountains of paperwork I had to do to land myself a role in Shanghai. And so that did not work out. And felicitously, because I found out a couple months later that I was pregnant and I would have been loath to get up, give up a big promotion to stay home and have my son.

So, so is that when you left corporate or did you continue on in another position?

I actually, after that, after the international move that didn't happen, I moved laterally again to my last lateral move. And I call these lateral moves, they were. Technically I was receiving promotions, but they weren't in my— there was no more climbing happening, right? It was just jockeying for position, and they weren't necessarily positions that I wanted. They were positions where I was helping the business, building teams, rebuilding process, lots of really cool things. And I stayed there for a year in that role. And after I had my son, I took an extended maternity leave, and then I took 6 months to help my son's dad build his business. So I did leave my corporate job at that stage.

Wow. And ever since that time, you've been doing leadership development and consulting and that sort of thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yep.

So tell us about Legacy Leadership Institute. Yeah.

So at Legacy Leadership Institute, we're proud to try to make the impossible possible for small business owners. Our sweet spot are businesses who have already passed those first 5 years in business. So they've passed that first major milestone of making it through their 5th year, and they generally have $1.5-2 million of annual revenue or more, but they're stuck at a plateau. And we are really passionate about helping a statistically significant higher number of people break through the $10 million barrier.

So you're scaling, you're helping them scale, helping them scale, right?

And some of them, don't need to scale massively. They just need to learn how to control their growth or how to predict their growth and how to make their business more predictable and get through their stuckness, right? Because every business stalls out at some point and we are really experts at helping them through the sell point.

What kinds of problems do you see small businesses having when they're stuck at that $1.5-2 million level? They want to scale, they can't, they're having issues. What's the tip? What are the typical problems that you see?

My favorite problem that I love it when people say, because it's always the symptom that they think is the problem. They say, oh my gosh, Madeline, I need more leads. And I say, okay, I need more leads. They just think that if they, if only they could get more leads, then their business would really grow. What the real problem is that small businesses reach the capacity of the owner to lead it. It's a leadership capacity. It's a blend of business acumen and business discipline that makes them stay in their same environment again and again. Right. They seek the familiar even when they don't think that they are.

This is where the leader has to learn to grow, but to let go and grow. Yes. Don't micromanage. Don't control everything. Hire people that are smarter than you are and let them do their thing.

Do their thing within— with a system of accountability baked into the business. Right. So that's another piece that one of my favorite moments, because I've chatted with thousands of business owners, right, throughout the course of my career. And I asked someone once what his leadership style was. Deadpan, right? Straight face. He meant this fully. He looked me in the eyes and he says, micromanagement. And I was like, whoa, okay, I now know why your business is stuck. Okay, no further exploration is needed. Um, that's just micromanagement is just a symptom of control. That's all. It's lack of trust.

In my business, and from where I come from as a peacemaker, it's anxiety. It's lack of anxiety management.

Yeah. Yes.

Unconscious anxiety that's driving you into making decisions that are not adaptable because you're unaware of your own anxiety. And so in order to alleviate the anxiety and self-soothe, you're going to try to control everything.

Right.

And all that does is more anxiety.

Yeah. It's like, when in the, when in the history of ever has squeezing more tightly helped someone breathe freely?

Right. Or the way I describe it is imagine having a water balloon.

Yeah.

You can keep squeezing that water balloon as much as you want, but guess what happens? Eventually you're going to have a big wet mess on your hands.

That's right. It's going to pop. There's nowhere for the water to go.

That's right.

A lot of people think just bring in smarter people and they'll elevate you. They will only elevate you if you are prepared to take that journey. Right? Otherwise, water seeks its own level and they will come down to you and you will watch a highly capable person have poor performance in your company.

So how hard is it in your experience to get an entrepreneur founder to, to move to the next level, to grow personally?

Yeah.

And to evolve into becoming more of a CEO and less of an entrepreneur? Yeah.

So we look at entrepreneurs in 3 different types of archetypes or profiles. We look at genuine entrepreneurs, we look at people who are artists, and we look at people who are what we call manager leaders. And there are founders, people who start businesses, people who own businesses in each one of those categories, right? The manager leader, to get them to step into CEO, they have to embrace visionary behaviors, right? They have to find a way to inspire people because usually they don't have that inspirational something. Artist who loves the craft of what they do, who's in love with what they make, has to be able to detach from the art of it enough to embrace a little bit of process and to be able to empower people to execute on their behalf. So it's art of delegation. So important. They're, they're usually horrible at it. CE entrepreneurs have to learn the art of restraint. They have to learn to stop chasing every shiny penny and to concentrate and dominate and that, that their pace is usually wildly different than the pace of their team. They will go at 5,000 miles an hour, stop, 5,000 miles an hour, stop. That's how they operate, in these extreme bursts of energy and then an idle. And while they're idling, they're usually gathering, right? There's not— it's not actual idle, but people don't work like that. That's not typical behaviors. So it really truly depends which archetype you are, how hard it is for you to step into that CEO role and how problem aware you are. So we generally, we work with people in this context after they've already said yes. So they've made an investment in their business and they want to see the ROI.

They wouldn't hire you otherwise.

They wouldn't hire us otherwise. So they have to have change readiness or a growth mindset. Willingness, just willingness. And we just tell them like, look, it's going to be different than what you think it is. They think, oh, we'll just hire people and put some process in. That's what they think. And then turn on the sales fountain and all of a sudden, my friend, it's you yourself are going to have to look in the mirror and make some hard choices to either let go, embrace change, whatever the things that you need to do. So sometimes it can be very gentle and easy because they're ready. And sometimes they buck the system a little bit.

Tough. Yeah. So what does get you excited in the morning? You've been doing this for a while now. What is it that gets you up in the morning, gets you excited to go to work and help these people?

Oh goodness. That is such a good question. There's lots of things. So I believe in both the infinite and the finite potential of people, right? I love that whole— there's each person has such a huge volume of capacity and my personal mission in this world, just me as a human, not necessarily Legacy Leadership as an organization, but me as a human, is to unleash people's full potential. And then in Legacy, we do that through unleashing the full potential of an organization and through those leaders. And that just makes me so profoundly happy and excited because there's just such a— people have so much more capacity than what they know. And being able to help them see it, spot it, unleash it, is just such a beautiful gift. And it's delightful for people to circle back into my life and say, hey, this thing we started 10 years ago, or this thing you helped me with. I literally had a guy the other day. Um, I just published a book called The Tenacious Pursuit of Peace: Where to Go When Success Is Not Enough. It hit shelves about a month and a half ago. It's been doing very well. Really excited about it. And one of my customers, remember how I told you I went to all those manufacturers and started building that business? One of my early customers who had helped start a business. He grew his business the fastest I'd seen anyone ever do it. He got to $1.2 million in 8 months. So that was pretty outrageous. He read my book. This is 15 years ago. He, I helped him do that and he read my book and reached out to me on social and said, hey, what are you up to? Read your book and was great. What are you up to these days? And I shared with him about Legacy and he hired us. Because he is at the place he's been at the 6, 7, 8 million, 6, 7, 8 million, 6— stuck in that little cycle. And he's hired us now to help him pass through 10 to 15. And that was just such a cool full circle moment in watching this person who raw potential 15 years ago step into this incredible business leadership role, have built this amazing organization, and now be in a place to grow it more. Like, that's so fulfilling.

Yeah, that's cool.

Yeah.

What do you think it's unique about you that you bring to the table that makes all this work?

I have a very atypical capacity to help people embark on hard things in a way that feels really smooth and elegant and easy. So I have a really easy facility to take big, gnarly, complex situations, ideas, problems, and make them very attainable and achievable. And I have this just the right amount of inspirational something that I do. It's inspirational magic that I sprinkle with the super tactical, practical side. And the merging of those two is really that what's been fused into our business. And it just makes a really compelling, a compelling set of, I don't know, specialties that helps people to embrace the journey with a lot less resistance.

I've lately, I've been thinking a lot about leadership empathy because my business, in my business, listening is everything. In fact, I think listening is the foundational skill of life. And leadership empathy is something that's talked about a lot, but nobody really knows what it is. And they don't realize that it's a teachable skill. Anybody can learn it. And it only takes about 8 weeks to master the skills of leadership empathy. I'm curious. How important is— have you found leadership empathy and specifically, and listening more generally to be as a skill that your clients need to develop in order to scale?

We— there have been so many trainings that I've taught where it's like you have one mouth and two ears for a reason. Let's maintain this balance, right? Are you speaking twice as much as you're listening? You have it in the reverse, right? What we've seen is that when people build the habit of asking great questions and of creating space for their people to respond to them, then innovation can happen. So we build a lot of those empathetic listening skills into some very simple— we call them habits of execution— that become cultural norms within a business. Because if you don't allow the people who you've brought in to help you execute the business space, then all their good ideas die on the vine. And you have to be that one choke point of all innovation. And that doesn't allow for the business to be so as agile as it needs. So I think it's a really critical skill. And I think that it needs to be fused not only in the habits of the leader, but really into the culture of the business. There's always space made for people to bring their best to the table.

I find that culture is totally reflects the attitudes and values and behaviors of the leader. Yeah. And that's where culture starts and ends because people model their behaviors after the people at the top, the people who are the owners of the leaders. And so if you want trust and loyalty and connection and cooperation and collaboration, then you better be modeling that behavior.

Yes. You better bring it.

Yep. You better know how to do it and you better be, you better know how to not only ask the right questions, But when somebody answers the question, make sure they feel like their answer has been heard at a very deep level.

That's right.

That's what most leaders don't get. They think that it starts with asking the right question, but it's not where it stops. It stops when you can make sure that whoever is giving you information feels like they've been deeply heard. And then what happens is there may be disagreement, but when people feel deeply heard, They don't care. They don't care about the outcome. All they care about is being heard. And if you can hear them, listen to them, I call it listening other people into existence. If you can listen your people into existence, they'll follow you anywhere.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah.

And you will not have disagreements and you will always have people who are loyal and will trust you and will follow you anywhere. You'll be the leader that everybody wants to follow.

I love that. I have many years ago, I built a training called How to Handle Haters. It was actually for my customer service department back in the day when they were getting reamed out by angry customers. And sometimes people call into customer service or tech support and they're angry. And one of the very critical parts of that listening environment was to let them empty their cup fully. Stop letting them pour a little bit out and then start to pour in a solution, right? That's the wrong step. Right. And as a leader, being able to listen deeply sometimes means developing that habit of, and what else? Tell me more. Is there anything else? What else? And just that simple ask is that moment of deepening that listening. So that, because sometimes people tell you the surface thing and then they'll tell you the next thing, but that third layer, like they're reticent to share it. And if, but if you say, yeah, it's unsafe, right? But you come with genuine, what else? Is there anything else? And the genuineness of meaning that allows them the space to open that. And when they've emptied all the way out, then you can fill them, fill up, right? You can fill them with all the good, right?

When I'm teaching my graduate students, I tell them de-escalate, then problem solve.

Absolutely. Yeah.

And how do you de-escalate? You don't listen to the words, you listen to their emotions.

Are they done being mad?

Or can you— venting doesn't work. Catharsis doesn't work. Just letting people go off and be angry. The science shows that just makes them angrier. What you really need to do is listen to and reflect their emotional experience. It's a process known as affect labeling. And there are brain scanning studies that show that when you affect label somebody, you literally tell somebody what they're feeling, that the emotional centers of the brain are inhibited and their prefrontal cortex is activated. And you can literally calm an angry person in 90 seconds or less. And that's the title of my 4th book. And I acid tested this in maximum security prisons over 15 years, teaching lifers and long-termers how to stop prison violence. Wow, that's cool. And yeah, it's powerful. And so as a leader, if you can learn how to listen your people into existence so they feel deeply heard, your meetings are shorter, you get more done, you make better decisions, you have higher retention, and you have people who will do anything for you.

Yeah, I love that.

Feel validated by you. And that's, that's the secret that I teach because I see that as being the foundational skill Yeah. Everybody else misses.

Sal solves such a deep human wound, right? People are not being seen, not being heard, not feeling good enough. Those three are the quintessential, especially like North American wounded, woundednesses of us as individuals. And when we can lean in and really be present with someone like that, it's moving.

And that's a, what you just described is a shared experience. That almost everybody has. When people start recognizing that this is a shared experience, and yes, you feel— you don't feel heard, you feel ignored, you feel imposter syndrome, you feel disrespected, you don't feel appreciated or supported, and you're sad by all of this. This all makes you sad and disconnected and upset and angry. When you start recognizing that emotional experience, it changes everything.

Yeah.

And so I tell leaders, embrace the emotions of your people. Don't tell them to park their emotions at the door.

You bring all of who you are to everything that you do. So even if you tell them to park it, they're not gonna.

Correct. And yeah, so that stuff's pretty important. And that I suspected that you would be aligned with these ideas.

Yeah, I love it. It's very, it's a different, different perspective on something that I hold to be very true as well. And I just love the, I love the multifacetedness of some of these business fundamentals and core leadership truths, because when you just turn that diamond a little bit, it catches a whole new level of sparkle. And that's just.

Exactly correct. So what's next for you? You're, you mentioned earlier that you merged this firm. Legacy Leadership came as a merger of two businesses. Now you're growing it. What do you do next?

We're going to continue to grow it. We're still in our first year. So we are achieving, passing lots of milestones really fast. And one of my, I love, I have a bias for speed. My very first course I taught, which I'm sure is not going to surprise you, is called Fast Track Sales Systems. Teach people how to sell well. And there's a system to that. There's a method to that magic. Magic has a method to it. So for me, I'm working on another book. I have a beautiful children's book that I published last year. I have my, like, my Tenacious Pursuit, which I published this year. I'm working on another book, which will be more business forward. The Tenacious Pursuit is more personal development. So working on another book, I'll be doing a book tour this year. Doing a lot more speaking in the long range. I, one of my big goals, big dreams, I want to speak on a Tony Robbins style stage. I love, I love the microphone. So I, that's part of my journey. I still have a young son, still a solo mom. I have a 9-year-old. So a lot of beautiful years ahead in my career, and I'm just delighted to watch what unfolds.

Good for you. And, and of course, serve people, serve your clients by helping them grow and prosper and allow them to serve other people because as they gain wealth, and stature and influence, they can serve.

Yes, we have this beautiful philosophy of building a whole community of philanthropreneurs.

There you go.

Who are guided to give. And one of our core things that we always— an idea we just sprinkle in with our clients during our deep dive process, which is our kind of our initiation into our world, is that my business partner, several years ago, he and his wife decided that they would like to charitably give the amount of money that they made their first year in business.

Wow.

For anyone who's not in business, you think, oh my gosh, that's a gargantuan number. But it's not. We all know as entrepreneurs, right? That's probably more attainable than you think when you really look at the math. Right. That one guy who did $1.2 million in 8 months, like, maybe that's— maybe not him. But that was just such an inspiring— that's actually what I'm aspiring to do this year is give equivalent to what I made my first year in business.. And I definitely will, and I'm super excited about it, but it's just something that we put out there for a lot of our client, for all of our clients and how many of them are inspired by that and wanna embark on that journey because the rising tide lifts all the boats.

That's right.

And part of the reason why we're called Legacy Leadership Institute is that we really want to enable particularly small businesses and the owners and the teams and the leaders who, who run them to leave a legacy and both in a material way and in an immaterial way, right? To genuinely leave a legacy. And if you don't build a business that can sustain a generational transition, then you're not gonna leave a legacy with your business.

Right. Interesting. One more question. I'll let you go. What's one thing about yourself, Madeleine, that we would never know about?

Oh, there's so many facets of Natalie.

Just one that's kind of cute and funny and quirky.

One funny weird quirk about me. Okay. I, I love, love, love electronic music. I have a very wide and varied taste on music, like super heavy metal, alternative rock, opera, classical, Vivaldi. Sign me up for that. Like everything. I love music. Asterisk, not so much country. I don't really love country music. Yeah, but I love music, and when I really need just a getaway break, I will take a couple days off and I will go to an electronic music concert, and I will full garb, like all the outfits, all the everything, and I'm just not Madeline for the day. I'm just someone else. And people ask me what I do for work and start talking about work, and I'm like, wait a minute, do you see this outfit I'm dressed in? That means I'm not working right now. I just say that over and over to total random strangers. But that's my one little weird quirky thing that I love to do, and it just gives me a— it's just a beautiful, like, fun escape. And it's just a— and it's such a fun environment that, yeah, that's what I do. It's way off the scene.

I'm a jazz violinist, so there you go.

Ah, there you go. I, I played violin for 4 years. I played Piano for Two. I was terrible at it. I have no, no musical talent to build on. I have great vocal talent. I can sing, but boy, oh boy, the violin was tricky. I practiced and practiced, but just such little— such a lot of skill, but such little talent to pull from, really.

Good for you, Madeline. This has really been an enjoyable conversation. Thank you so much for your time today.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Love being here.

You're welcome. Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media, just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and Your likes and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.