119: Why Good Leadership Advice Drifts to Bad Leadership Behavior

Are you accidentally using a good leadership tool for evil? Let's find out in this episode. Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of the Reality-Based Leadership Podcast. I'm Alex Dorr, CEO at Reality-Based Leadership, and this is the podcast where we help you lead without drama, Build alignment in your teams and call those you lead to greatness. And so, every episode, that's what we're talking about is where are the interferences, the sources of drama that are gonna keep your team from their full potential, and then what is a quick tool, technique, or topic that we can better understand to move beyond it? And in this episode, this podcast was inspired by a series of events that happened that just scream that I need to talk about this topic. And those are my favorite podcasts because client conversations, things I'm listening to, things I'm reading come together and create the spark that is, Alex, put your thoughts together and add to the discussion. And so, I got to do a little bit of a setup and then we'll get into the idea and then the reflection at the end for you to be thinking about over the next couple of weeks. And so, I'm calling this Why Good Leadership Advice Often Creates Accidentally bad leadership—that's the topic. And underneath that, the the let's start with what I was listening to and what sparked a lot of insight for me in a way that I had not felt in a while from a podcast. And it was a conversation about the idea of near and far enemies. This is a apparently it's a Buddhist concept where there is in your life there are things that you maybe are striving for, like a. And I'm gonna give a couple of examples. That is a good virtue. It is a good thing for your life, for your leadership. And then if you're not mindful, there is obviously the opposite of that you wanna avoid. And again, I'm gonna give some examples, but then there's these— that's a far enemy. So, the opposite of the good thing would be the far enemy. And then there's this near enemy that looks like you're doing it right, like not hitting the opposite, the bad thing, and it actually is still not helpful. And that's why it's a near enemy, because many of us miss it. We think we're moving towards the helpful path, but it actually is not helpful. And in fact, it can be even more harmful because it's almost hidden and it's sneaky. And so, that was the conversation. And I promise I'll get more, get a couple of examples to clarify what I mean by that. Now, in the same element of this conversation on a client call, I had a client that was looking at bringing me in for a session, and they're very innovative. Obviously, I can't say the client name, but lots of breakthrough innovation, lots of growth and speed, and it's a household name. Like, a lot of us would recognize their products and what they do. And in the call, I had brought up that it sounds like this is a moment, as things are getting really busy and scaling rapidly, that it might be some time to talk a little bit about structure and non-negotiables so people know the structure and how to do work efficiently and communication channels, decision-making channels, and clarity. So then people know where to play. Because without structure, it leads to chaos, and people don't know where to play, and it gets real messy, lots of conflict, lots of drama. Yeah. And I've had a couple of podcasts I've covered that. I've been fascinated with the balance of structure and play. So we have enough clarity of where people can plug in and allow enough room to play so people can use their creativity, their spirit. And so this is all coming together on the call. And so I had brought up structure and then they're like, ooh, that is the one word that if you bring it up in the call, like everyone's gonna check out. They're gonna be like, you don't understand our culture and you're bringing in like the devil word is structure because we're gonna lose all of our creativity, all of our innovation, all of our stuff that makes us great and different in the marketplace. And so these 2 podcasts I was listening to and this client call, why does this come together with near and far enemies? So let me give a couple of examples and I'll bring it to the client call after the examples. So let's say near and far enemies. Let's say the thing I'm going for, like the goal, As a leader, as a human being, is I want to be empathetic, is empathy. I think we can all agree that's a good thing. And so empathy is what I'm going for. Well, the— I guess the far enemy, think of it as like the opposite of that, would be I just don't care about this colleague at all, or I don't care about the person I'm leading at all when they bring up an issue. So it's just not caring. That's the far enemy. It's kind of obvious that we want to avoid that. But the near enemy is sympathy. And those of you that have been around reality-based leadership a long time, is one of the biggest challenges for leaders, especially new leaders, is confusing empathy with sympathy. And sympathy is where I collude with you. I agree that you're the innocent victim and there's nothing you can really do about this circumstance. And you're right, it's not fixable, solvable, improvable. So, that's where it sounds like I'm being empathetic, but I'm just colluding with you and I feel pity for you almost. So, that's the near enemy, almost even worse because I kind of have that one-up feeling and it masquerades as empathy. So, that's one example. Now, the other example I heard on the podcast that leads to the client call, I'm not saying it's exactly this, but this is the sense I was getting, is let's say that discipline is one of the virtues or the goals. And I think we can all agree that having discipline in our lives is a good thing in most cases because we have good habits, we stick to those habits, and if they're lined up and we're disciplined on them, it leads to good results and more joy. So, let's say discipline is what we're going for. Now, the far enemy of that, I guess, would be like no structure and it's just chaos, I guess, if you want to That's how we could call it, far enemy. And then, the near enemy though is interesting. It's rigidity. And, when this was brought up on the podcast, it kind of blew my mind because I was an ex-athlete. So, there's always this balance between being disciplined in your workouts and your eating and your habits and your sleep, and then basically not living a life or avoiding time with friends. And, I know there's sacrifices and there's trade-offs. All of that I get. But there is this fine line where you go from discipline to literally this weird suffering from too much rigidity in a messy and uncertain world. And the example they gave on the podcast is one of the interviewers had a friend that was like an elite athlete, Olympic level, and they had a rule in their house that there's no noise after 8:00 PM. Non-negotiable. You know, if that happens, and when it did happen, the person's day, like they're up till 8:30 because of some noise. They're like, whole next day's ruined. Or I just keep thinking, I got 3 little kids. I'm like, noise past 8? Are you joking? Like, how do you enforce that? Um, or if you live in a neighborhood or if you live in an apartment complex, like, or there's celebrations. I was just in Spain visiting, um, family with my wife and there was like the World Cup, like Spain won, and there's people driving the streets, jumping in the fountains. And it's like, if my rule is not past 9 or 8 o'clock, there can't be any sound, like, that is not designed for the real world. And so that's where it's not— that's not discipline for that athlete. That's crossing over into rigidity. And maybe someone would argue that, but I thought the example really helped me. And so I got to thinking about— to the client example is, Just bringing up the word structure at all, it just shut everything down. And so then, what do you call it, process? What do you call it, standardisation? I mean, this is key to scale, key to consistency. This is a key part of good business that is a word that their entire team or a large chunk of their team avoids if you even bring it up. And so obviously, we're gonna work to not say the word structure, but maybe we say, Process or standardization or some other word, maybe it doesn't start with an S, to say we might need to bring in a counterbalance of enough structure so people know where to play. And, and so bringing these all together as, as the big setup is, I'm fascinated over the last month or so about these near and far enemies because I've made a few podcasts about something I see happen a lot with reality-based leadership. And for you that's excited about reality-based leadership, or maybe even leading in this way for a long time, is the fact that any good leadership philosophy or a good leadership tool, if used unintentionally or if used in a way that is for evil, it can be turned into evil. Like, if it can be— if it's too over-rotated, it can be used for evil. And I realised what I was basically getting at is there's the obvious far enemies that our whole premise is based off of, Reality-based leadership's about ditching the drama and recapturing the 2.5 hours a day that people lose in drama at work. And then we go into the sources of drama, which are lack of accountability, ego-based behaviors, gossiping, tattling, venting, scorekeeping, and then there's lack of alignment, and then there's resistance to change. Those are the 4 heavy hitters of the sources of drama. So then— Yeah. Basically, drama, far enemy is all of those. Those are the 4 sources. So, in a sense, what we teach is trying to avoid or overcome those 4 far enemies. Now, what I often see though is let's go at ego, for example. Let's say the goal is because ego is usually fueled by venting. The ego loves to vent instead of self-reflect because it can stay the victim. So, it loves venting. So, in a session, I'll train the fact that venting is just not helpful. And we talk about the difference between sharing a feeling and venting. And then people hear that and they just say, okay, all venting shut off. Like, no one can bring anything up. If it sounds like complaining, it's obviously venting. I label it as venting and we're just gonna shut it down. The moment I hear it, no venting. This is a no-venting zone. And that's where we are really being rigid and just shutting out the far enemy. But then the near enemy that comes with that is, yeah, no venting. We're going past— we're trying to get past ego. But then, The near enemy is nobody can bring anything up or we can't share true concerns. And so that's where I see this idea of our great content, great idea is moving past ego, understanding ego, navigating it as a leader, as a coach, because it's a huge source of suffering and drama, but then getting so rigid that we are avoiding some really important things like bringing up something that we're frustrated about That is not necessarily a complaint or ego or venting, but it is a real concern or a yellow flag of we got to consider this risk ahead. And if a leader is not intentional, they might label it as the far enemy without seeing that it's actually this near enemy that we got to understand to use it productively. And so, I was thinking about this a bunch, and I just started to list from reality-based leadership perspective, like, what are these patterns, these combinations? I did some reflecting on it. So, one of them— That I briefly mentioned is, let's say the goal is wholehearted buy-in to a decision or a strategy. So that's the goal. Let's call it the virtue. Now, the far enemy would be resistance to that, like flat-out resistance to the strategy or buying into the strategy. But the near enemy would be what I call conditional buy-in, where someone's like, I'm all in as long as Or I'm all in, but I have these concerns. And then we as a leader, as a team, don't have a conversation about those concerns or those conditions. And a lot of my sessions, I talk a lot about how do we coach on I'm all in as long as there's not competing priorities, as long as everyone else follows the process right away like I do. Like, how do you coach on maybe that near enemy, that conditional buy-in? That's the nuance. I find that's the harder part. of really disciplined reality-based leadership and being a modern leader. The far enemies maybe are fairly easy to teach and notice and coach on. But when you're into that near enemy territory, that's where it's a little bit more challenging. And so that was another example. Or let's say similar to what I already covered, but like a drama-free workplace. That's really what our whole thing's about. That's the goal. But then so the far enemy is a drama-fueled or drama-filled workplace. So, that's, that's, that'd be what is the far enemy. And that's what we're trying to avoid. But the near enemy would be a drama avoidant culture where we just label it drama, but then we don't get more skillful in it. We don't use the drama as fuel to figure out what's really going on, how to use the drama, the constraints, the circumstances to hold space and invite people in to think through, given the circumstances, how do we succeed? What's our part in it? What are you doing that's not helpful? What am I doing that's not helpful? Like, the drama actually fuels the growth. But if we're drama avoidant, we miss all of that learning. Where we're in pain is where we need to grow next as a team. And if we're at that near enemy, which is a drama avoidant culture, or people now think they can't bring things up and it's not psychologically safe, now we're into— that near enemy territory, and that gets challenging. That's definitely not helpful, possibly even worse in some cases when it comes to our culture. And so that's another one. Another one I was playing with is, let's say you want highly accountable team members. So much of what we teach in Reality-Based Leadership, what you're working on, is how do we grow accountability in our teams? Because in the research, it leads to happiness, engagement, and results. So that would be the goal. Now, the opposite of that, the far enemy would be we're trying to avoid blame and finger-pointing. But the near enemy, which is interesting, would be a culture of people that over-function or they have this controlling belief with accountability that they can pull everything off and succeed with enough accountability. Like, if I'm all in and I'm super resilient and I work extra hours and we muscle through and I just kind of plow through everything, I can use accountability to succeed in spite of all circumstances, no matter what. And there's no balance to it. There's no, here's what I did that helped or hindered. Here's where I kept a little bit of balance and came with accountability on, here's the progress we made. Here's where maybe we fell short. Here's where I might switch up in the next time and delegate differently. Like, that's a balanced, healthy form of accountability. And then the near enemy is that over-rotated, control-it-all, work extra hours, burn people out to get the results we need. And I'm all into that sometimes where you really got to push and hit deadlines. I get that. That's part of life in the world. But over and over, we want to watch for that near enemy. Before I go into another example, what I realized in this reflection is with my new book, How We Could, coming out in— we're at about a month, September 22nd. So if you haven't got it, be sure— shameless plug here— to preorder it, preorder it for your teams. We even had Mel Robbins recently say, an amazing quote and endorsing the book. And Mel's got the top podcast in the world, basically, as far as downloads. Her quote was, stop making excuses and start creating results. And How We Could is a 5-step practical guide to overcome any excuses or drama and get into next right action with those that you coach and for yourself. And so, be sure to preorder it. And I realised what happened as I was going through the book is a lot of my 12 years of doing this, Is those comments or questions in my session were really around these near enemies. It's like the second layer of the drama that gets hard to lead around. Most people are like, you're preaching to the choir. The far enemies, resistance to change, lack of accountability, that stuff's obvious. But where it gets tough is this nuance at the near enemy, conditional buy-in, and how do you welcome concerns about a decision Even though it might feel like resistance at the beginning, these are those tougher examples that all of you are familiar with. And so, in that book, I realised I was going at those near enemies and giving you tools for that. And I'm excited about that with this new insight that that's there, and I can see how these tools can be used for that to help us all go to the next level, past those far enemy drama sources to those near enemy, those more challenging ones. And so it's like, how do you impact those snags? How do you coach through them? How do you have those sometimes medium or difficult conversations to shift mindsets around that? And that's what the book, I realised, has a lot of good tools for. And so the last example that this came together was in a separate session, not on a client call, but a separate session where I saw this all coming together on both sides of the near enemy, far enemy conversation. It's an example I already talked about where I had introduced a tool about how to overcome resistance to change, and we'd done a lot of work on buy-in and moving a strategy forward. And it was after the session, before I headed off to the airport, that a team member came up and was talking about that tool was interesting, and they're leading a change that's disrupting some workflows with other departments. And one of the other team members came up into our huddle there with vulnerability and said, today was really valuable because This tool is what I'm trying to tell you from our team side. I know we might sound and feel resistant. We know we need to get on board. We know it's decided. We know we need to buy in. We want to buy in. But we just have, from our expertise, 7 to 10 real concerns that just aren't being answered yet. And so, I haven't had a way to share this without it sounding just negative on a call and just dumping on you. And so, this tool, and I'm referring to our negative brainstorming tool, is I want to list out our issues and talk about the risks and how we mitigate those risks. I want to do that. So, I'm not resistant. I just have some real yellow flag kind of unspoken worries that I want to get out to you to then partner with together to get into— buy into the change. And I loved that. in this conversation because that is literally the power of the tools, not only in my new book or in our toolkit, something like the negative brainstorming tool, because it's going at that. See how messy that is where it's a change that's decided? They've been trying to push it out, move it forward from the project management side, the change management side. And then a key department sounds resistant, is labeled as resistant because they're bringing up concerns. But maybe they're getting a little charged up. They feel like they're not being heard. And this tool sets that venue for them to say, list out the real issues, and then let's work together on how do we have a plan to move around those challenges if they come up. So, this tool was able to address and notice the far enemy happening, but bring them together towards this near enemy to solve it, converse about it, hold space for it. And that really is the next unlock. And I think many of us, if we're not intentional, like, this doesn't come from being a lazy leader. This comes from being an intentional leader in a habit of using the tools and giving us some time to be able to start to see this and feel this when it's happening. And so, if you've had some initial success with quick use of our tools or techniques or quotes to ditch the drama and you feel like, You're hitting the far enemy, resisting venting, less blame and lack of accountability, there's a little bit more alignment, or there's— you're getting quick at the resistance to change, and you feel like people are now a little, like, uncomfortable, or there's some unspoken things happening, it could be that the near enemy are starting to happen. And that's where bringing in some of our tools and actually going at what I listed here as near enemies could be a big unlock. And inviting people in through the tools to say, you know, I know you're not maybe resisting change. I know you got a lot on your mind. You kind of— you actually have a face on. I see you thinking. Is there some unspoken worries or is there some things that are causing you to have conditional buy-in that you might want to talk about? Let's look at that. I'm open to it. And that invitation, I promise you, is like the next level of modern leadership that's right there for you. And so, again, The lesson here, every leadership goal, like every virtue, like what we're going for, especially with ditching the drama, is there's this almost counterfeit blanketed version of, uh, that looks almost identical, like you're doing it right, that can actually be not helpful. And that's what I tried to point out in this podcast. And there's probably so many more examples. I'll keep thinking of them. And so that's what makes them If you want to call it dangerous, because you might unknowingly be doing them, you might not see them right away. And then as this scales, if you have a lot of reality-based leaders excited about the philosophy, it can scale where all of a sudden we have a lot of people using it accidentally for evil instead of good. And we're missing those, those near enemies. And, and so I wrote down here just thinking like, like far enemies are easy to spot. It's kind of the obvious sources of drama, drama. Mm-hmm. But those near enemies require a bit more wisdom, a bit more stillness, a bit more really tuning into your team and making sure, by the way, you're not getting bogged down in firefighting, fixing, jumping in to solve it. If you're not elevating your leadership up with more coaching, using tools, facilitating good mental processes, there's not going to be space to be able to see these nuances. And that's why each podcast episode, all the content I'm putting out, I try and pair it with a tool that says, hey, in this situation where something's stuck, don't give a quote, don't throw one of our favorite reality-based leadership statements at it. Facilitate reflection, ask a good coaching question, use a tool from our toolkit to invite people in, and that can be the breakthrough to free you up to be able to see more of these near and far enemies. So, what's the reflection? To send us off here, I'd love for you to, as you walk the next couple of weeks, try and notice where one place in your leadership is where it might be drifting into near enemy territory, where in your mind you think what you're doing is good. We're really working on a certain aspect of your leadership to overcome that barrier, but where is it over-rotating or maybe drifting into a near enemy where what you think is empathy, you're actually sympathizing with someone? where you think someone's resisting change, so you're doing a hard job coaching and setting expectations, but what they're actually needing is a venue to share some of their unspoken worries and their concerns? Where are we saying that labeling everything as venting and BMW driving when we need to insert a tool to say, we want to hear your concerns, but let's put those through an SBAR, or let's do some thinking inside the box on, given your concerns, Now, what ideas do you have to move this forward? So, bringing in that tool that dances better with the near enemy is the breakthrough. So, thank you so much for listening to this somewhat what I would call nerdy episode. And so, thanks for indulging me a bit. But I hope this has gotten you thinking about a space you could be stuck or noticing a bit of stagnation in your reality-based leadership journey. Please share this with others on your team. Those with the twinkle in their eye that are trying to ditch the drama and they believe that work can be more effortless and teams can be drama-free. And please rate this if you like these podcast episodes and on, on the, the podcast platform that you're listening to, please give it 5 stars, give a little bit of a comment, and that helps others find it as well. Looking forward to seeing you on the next episode. In the meantime, keep loving people up and don't forget to call people up to greatness. We'll see you soon.