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INTRODUCTION

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 not only not the solution, it is the hidden cause of many of those problems in the first place. It’s why people don’t own their work. It’s why they make sloppy mistakes and don’t care about the customer in the ways you want. And it’s why every single meeting you have ends with talking about how people need to communicate better.

Good Authority is based on three core principles that we’ll be teasing out and developing along the way. As you embark on the rest of this journey, keep them in mind. Let them work on you. If you’re anything like me, they can be a source of growth to you for years to come, helping you re-evaluate old assumptions about what it means to lead, about the purpose of work, and giving you permission to challenge people to go beyond where they are today.

1 The deepest purpose of a business is to change the lives of the people who work there.

2 The role of leaders and managers is to show people how professional and personal growth are inseparable.

3 The way to get people to be engaged is to be more engaged with them.

Now a few words about what Good Authority is not. This is not a book about achieving great wealth or tripling your sales this quarter—though I’ll be the first to congratulate you if you do. It’s not a substitute for the many other things you can do to humanize your business, like improving benefits packages, offering more flexible hours and remote work options, and so on. It’s a call to invest in a process that speaks to a different level: to our experience of work itself. To go all in with each person on your team. To discover who they are, what they’re about, and how you can help them grow.

Before we move on, we need to reframe the question the coaching and consulting industry has taught business leaders to ask. The right question isn’t “How do I get my people to engage?” The right question is: “How can I get better at engaging with them?”

This book is for anyone with a passion to change the status quo, anyone who believes that the world—your world—can be better than it is. It’s for leaders and managers in any industry, for-profit business, or not-for-profit business. Above all, it’s for anyone who has the awesome responsibility of having authority over another human being’s paycheck. This is a book about caring—for the heart, spirit, and financial future of the people in your charge.

What you’ll find throughout are methods and tools to help you have a new kind of conversation with each person on your team. I encourage you to use the tools as you see fit, to trust yourself, to make mistakes and learn. It isn’t magic, though I hope it sometimes feels that way. It won’t turn everyone on your team into a perfect team player overnight. You may get it wrong more times than you get it right. But if you invest in the journey, if you seek out feedback on how you’re doing from people you trust, and keep working at it, something amazing can happen to you.

Here’s a short overview of what you’ll find from here on out.

In Part One—Why Should I Care?—we’ll take a fresh look at the company culture problem. We’ll confront the most common myths about employee engagement, offer a new way to think about strengths and weaknesses, and close with a new vision for how everyone can share in the transformation instead of waiting for it to happen from the top down.

In Part Two—Personal Growth at Work—we’ll attempt to bridge the gap between the personal growth revolution that’s exploded over the last half-century and our current management theories that are bogged down by obsolete ideas about human motivation. We’ll offer a new method for creating a culture of accountability that helps people grow at work and in life at the same time.

And in Part Three—More Yoda, Less Superman—we’ll focus in on the specific tools and strategies you can use to develop your mentoring skills, including a new leadership archetype system in “Fixer, Fighter, or Friend?,” as well as a new perspective on how to draw out each person’s individual strengths in “The Five Employee Archetypes.”

You’ll quickly see that this book isn’t really a business book. It’s a book about relationships, about bringing the best of who we are to work, and slowing down the moments that matter. It’s about changing the world—starting with the people just down the hall.