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PREFACE

Jon Versus the Volcano

Home—is where I want to be.

But I guess I’m already there.

— Talking Heads

It seemed like the perfect day to hike up a volcano. But as we swallowed the last few bites of our pack-lunch the skies opened up. The gentle dirt path we’d been hiking up the last few hours was instantly transformed into a rapidly flowing river of Central American mud. We probably could’ve waited out the storm before heading back to the lodge. We probably should’ve. But we were 28 years old. So we made a run for it.

It was one of those experiences that starts out awful but becomes wonderful; awful for as long as you try and control it, wonderful when you finally let go. After a few minutes of repeated tripping and falling, I found my stride. If I lifted and stepped with just the right amount of force I could stay near the surface of the mud river, a kind of surf-walking. Pull too hard and my shoes were summarily sucked back down—and more than a few times pulled clear off—by this surprisingly sticky stuff. My traveling companions discovered it too. There was only one way to do it. And then the physical surrender turned to a mental one. My mind started to wander, freed up by the rhythmic monotony of motion. I started to feel how much pain I was actually in.

The pain was not in my legs. It was in my life. The year was 1999, and I’d graduated from law school the year before. I was one year into my first real “career”—slaving away in the bowels of a large, prestigious Manhattan law firm. I was drawn in by the money and the high stakes. When I faxed a copy of my first paycheck to my grandmother she called me a minute later to let me know it must’ve been a clerical error and that I should just keep quiet and hope they didn’t notice.

I loved the negotiations, the intellectual challenge of organizational structure, high finance, and the opportunity to learn from people at the very top of the game. But the personal price was impossibly high. Everyone around me was miserable. There were unbearable tyrants in the corner offices. But, like every other business I’ve ever come across, this one was mostly filled with kind and dedicated people trying to make the best of a tough situation.

The problem was the inhumanity of it all: the unrealistic expectations of leadership; a team of people who might otherwise be friends forced to compete with each other over resources; a toxic mix of power and unconscious behavior that left people feeling like they didn’t matter, that they didn’t have a voice, and that the only way to survive was to put their heads down and bear it. It was a profitable business. And a human disaster area.

That law firm was an extreme workplace in one way. But, as I would come to learn over the next few decades, when it came to the things that really mattered—to the emotional world where human beings live—it was far more the norm than I ever would’ve imagined.

But I didn’t have the life experience to know that while we were sliding down the volcano. The experience I had was far more simple: I was single, stressed-out, and depressed. And while I was no authority on souls—my family’s bible was The New York Times—I was certain that mine was seriously adrift. Somehow, in this one moment, I realized that continuing down the road I was on was no longer an option. I had to leave. I was still young enough to not worry too much about what would happen when I did. We were halfway down the trail when the words reached my lips.

“I’m done!” I threw my head to the sky and screamed out loud into the torrential rain. My very own Shawshank moment. I continued on with my personal pep talk. “I can’t spend another day pretending that this is okay. Everyone I work with is miserable. And nobody is doing anything about it. There has got to be a better way. I’m going to walk into Doug’s office on Monday morning and give my two weeks’ notice.”

Monday morning arrived. I was back at work and it was time to put my new-found resolve to the test. Quitting meant telling the boss—the senior partner in my department and one of the “Top 100 Lawyers in New York” (yes, that’s a thing). He was a small man and scary as hell. The screaming, brutish, Napoleon type. He was not what I would call a Good Authority.

I walked past his office three or four times, trying to work up the nerve, his secretary eyeing me and wondering what this was all about. Finally, I knocked on his open door. “Come on in,” he said, in a friendly tone that more than a little took me by surprise. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

“I’ve decided to leave the firm.”

And with those six little words, all of a sudden we were equals. Just two guys in a room. I wasn’t afraid anymore.

“I’m not happy. I don’t know what I want to do with my life, but this isn’t it.”

“Is there anything we can do to change your mind?” he asked with a curiosity I had never experienced with him before.

“No, there really isn’t. I appreciate you asking, but it’s time for me to go.”

“Do you know what you’re going to do?” By now I could tell that half of his mind had moved on to the next task on his list.

“I’m going to Vermont to do a week-long meditation retreat.”

As he shifted in his chair I could tell that the answer made him uncomfortable. He told some bad joke to break the tension, I laughed politely and walked out. It’s amazing how the authority figures we idolize crumble the moment we stop holding them up. It wasn’t the last time I’d learn that lesson.

I signed up for eight days of silence. Voluntarily. I pondered the wisdom of that decision as I pulled onto I-91 for the four-hour trip north to Vermont. “Jonathan, what are you thinking?” I muttered to myself in a variety of different voices. “Go home. You don’t need to do this.” I managed to stay in the car. Amidst the grueling torture of that retreat—eight days with nothing but my thoughts—something happened. It wasn’t enlightenment.

But it was a profound experience—an experience of myself. Not who I wanted to be. Not who I thought I should be. Nobody special. Just me—bones and flesh, thoughts and emotions coming and going. It was beautiful. Better than any drug—and I’d tried more than one. In that moment I made a decision, as much as you can decide anything long-term when you’re 28, unemployed, and single. I was going to ride that self-discovery train as far as it would take me.

I spent the better part of the next decade doing just that. I had jobs and ventures to pay the bills. But my heart was in the search. I went on more and longer retreats. I travelled to high mountains in faraway places to look for wise teachers. I moved to San Francisco, which, to a Jewish kid from the New York suburbs, was the mecca for all things weird and leading edge. I helped to start a renewable energy business. I dove headlong into the world of alternative healing: studied to be a yoga teacher, trained in somatic psychotherapy, and considered going back to school to get a master’s in psychology. I joined up with some friends to create a nonprofit that teaches meditation and mindfulness to kids in juvenile hall. I fell in love and had the first real long-term relationship of my life.

Along the way I found a few things that I was genuinely good at and could have made a career of. But I still couldn’t shake that feeling. The one that was sure that whatever I was supposed to be doing with my life, I hadn’t found it yet. It turns out, I didn’t need to. It was about to find me.

In 2011 I came across an opportunity that I couldn’t resist. I took on the CEO role at EMyth, the business coaching company behind the well-known book. The owner had decided to relocate the company to Ashland, Oregon, the small town halfway between Portland and San Francisco where I was living. Finding myself at the helm of a name-brand coaching company, with a mandate to revitalize the culture and take things in a new direction, was the kind of big city opportunity that I never imagined I’d find in a town known primarily for its annual Shakespeare Festival.

The first few years were a thrilling and wild ride. I was still pursuing my own personal work on the side, but the leadership journey I was on was too exciting to leave room for much else. I had a platform to express myself out in the world, the kind I’d always dreamed of. Along with my co-managers and our small but dedicated team, we took the company through a full-blown transformation: from culture and brand to technology and process, and everything in between. The team was inspired. The brand came back to life. People whose books I’d read said they loved my writing and the new message. Consultants who’d been around the corporate-transformation block praised the changes we’d made.

But there was a mismatch. It was there from the start, but I didn’t notice it from the uniquely weird viewpoint that comes with the CEO title. I was managing the business in the only way I knew, fast and full of risk. But being in a small town created some very real limits. The pace and kinds of risks I wanted to take were out of step with the stability and lifestyle most people move to a small town to have. People were genuinely inspired by what we were doing, but I was leading a different company in my head than the one that was there on the ground.

Isn’t it incredible how life brings you the voice you need to hear in the moment you need to hear it? I was in mid-realization of that mismatch when I went to a conference and heard two well-known corporate visionaries—Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm and Curt Richardson of OtterBox—share their stories of stepping out of the CEO role to make room for the leader the business needed next. My next step was as excruciating as it was clear: It was time for me to let go of what felt like my baby and make room for someone else. Second to meeting my wife, stepping out of the CEO role and into a supporting one was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Over the next two years I had two unique new experiences that few leaders ever have the “good fortune” to get. The first was that I got a taste of my own medicine. I saw what it was like to live and work in the culture that I’d created: The unrealistic pace of projects, how my appetite for risk was not shared by everyone on the team, how what looked like a clear initiative in a leadership meeting could still be incredibly confusing to the team trying to implement it. In my new business, this is one of the things we work actively with CEOs to see: how one idea from the top can spiral into 100 projects for the team and overwhelm them in ways the CEOs can’t even imagine.

But the second experience was the one that really hit me. It was that, as the CEO, I was radically overestimating the quality of mentoring that most managers—myself included—were doing with the people on their team. It’s a phenomenon I see repeating itself every day in the work I do now with managers at every level in different organizations around the world. What managers are doing, including some of the smartest and most caring people I’ve ever met, has almost no real mentoring to it. And even the mentoring they’re trying to do to get people to take personal responsibility is undermined by the background company culture dynamics that send a very different message: Keep your head down, do your job, and don’t rock the boat.

It’s incredibly easy for the CEO to miss. Under the enormous pressure of the role, their vision gets tighter. It becomes finely tuned to fluctuations in numbers and goals, and less sensitive to the interpersonal and interdepartmental dynamics. Employees start to feel less important even though you, as the CEO, know they’re not. And because you’re the person who holds everyone else’s paycheck in your hands, you almost never get honest feedback about how people are feeling. That is, until they’re frustrated enough to quit or they act out enough to get fired.

When it comes to employee development, what managers do—what I was doing—was almost exclusively the easy stuff: encouraging words, good advice, and, more than anything, jumping in to fix short-term problems to keep projects moving along. But what my team needed was something else entirely. They needed me to listen. They needed me to hear what they were saying and do something about it. They needed me to hear what they weren’t saying and use that insight to create more definition to their role so that there was even a job for them to own. And they needed me to set clear boundaries and make sure everyone was held accountable to the same standard. They were not lazy. They were not incompetent. And they were not uncaring. They were waiting.

I made a decision. Since I’d tried everything else, I was going to try something new, something that I’d written a lot of blog posts and delivered a lot of webinars and workshops about but had never really done. Not with all my heart. I was going to let my team tell me what they needed from me instead of me telling them what I needed from them. I was going to help them grow personally and trust that the professional side would take care of itself. I was going to do everything in my power—which was still quite a lot—to improve the experience of working there. I decided to do whatever I could to create a great place to work, one conversation at a time.

I started talking with each person on my team in a new way. I asked them far more personal questions than I’d dared to do before—not about their personal lives, but about their personal relationship to their work. I did a lot less assuming that I knew, or was supposed to know, the answers. I took the risk to let my guard down and shared more of how I struggled with some of the very same issues they did. They responded. They took ownership of their work in ways I always wanted them to but never knew how to bring out of them. And what was most rewarding for me was that the changes they were making translated into other parts of their lives. Sometimes I would hear about it directly, other times I could tell by how they talked about their lives in the water-cooler moments of the day. A few of those conversations when I got to hear it directly were what gave me the confidence to keep going.

I was in my office wrapping up a few things before heading home one afternoon. One of the guys on my team, who’d been working for me for about a year, stopped by on his way out the door. He was smart, capable, and was doing fine work. Still, as I’d come to know him over time, I had a sense that he had a whole other gear. For some reason, he was holding himself back. I’d made it my mission to find out why, and to see if I could help him take the next step in his own growth. We talked about the theme every week in our individual meetings. I gave him small assignments to push himself out of his comfort zone a bit more each week. I pointed out the micro-behaviors (more on that in Chapter Five)—the way 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.