Structure Side of Leadership

Welcome to the leading edge podcast, transforming your leadership with attachment science. Where are your hosts, Dr. James Hawkins and Dr. Ryan Reina? Together, we want to transform your leadership by sharing principles from attachment science to put you on the leading edge of leadership. Today's episode we're going to be talking about structure and the care side of this two side where we're talking about attachment science, that's what we're talking about today. And then next week, we'll be talking about the relational atoom inside of leadership. There's really two sides of the same force that Ryan talked about in our first podcast. And that really no leader can ever be 100% perfectly balanced on both sides of being this structure and providing those guidance and that kind of, that thing we say think about sometimes with managerial, doing the hard stuff, but then that relational atoom inside. And even, you know, Ryan pointed out something before we were talking in the pre-show that there are over 4,000 articles on attachment science and leadership, but it's not something once again that we get to hear about a lot, but it's something that people are recognizing. This really is what puts people on the leading edge of leadership. So let's take that deep dive today, Ryan, really talking about both sides of this are about connecting, but today we're focusing on the structure/care side of leadership. I try to like what you said and kind of, you know, going back to the previous episode, if you're leading people, you have to be able to access what's motivating them. And to me, attachment science gives us maybe one of the most clear ways to look at what motivates human behavior. So today we're talking, next week, we're going to talk about the relational attunement side. Today we're focusing on the structure side. If you're going to embrace your role as a leader, then you have to be able to work with and access your followers' motivation with healthy structure. And I think that's the first word I want to jump in with you here is to be effective. You got to be healthy in who you are. But in order to have healthy structure as a leader, you must be connected as a person. If you live on an island, if you are all about the job or your role and don't have some balance and connectedness in your life, whether it's relationally, spiritually, if you don't have something greater than yourself, your structure will always be off. You know, and it'll, it'll usually miss in one ditch or the other. You'll be too chaotic of a leader, so your, your team or your organization can never grow, or you'll be a tyrant, and tyrant leaders that have, quote, unquote, too much structure, they create rebellion, or they create followers who are only work when they have to. They'll never actually become all they, that they could be, but the other extreme is equally dangerous. It's chaos. It's chaos. And people can't grow in that environment. So the first piece I would launch off with is the healthy leader has to be connected in his or her personal life. And so what we talk about structure, I think about what we're referring to here is about setting limits. It's about clarity on roles and routine, what, what my role is as a leader and what my followers roles are and trying to get that clear. This is about the drive of leadership, the ability to set a limit when you have to. Sometimes a good leader has to get people off the team. As they say, it's cliche, but it's true. You have to get people on the right seat on the bus. That's a very structure way of looking at leadership. And it's the push. It's the push. It's this inherent sense that the leader conveys to his or her follower. But they can do more than they think they can. It's kind of a funny movie, but I use it a lot when I'm hired to speak with organizations. If you jump on YouTube and Google the death crawl scene from facing the giants, you see it leader exhibit really, really the structure and the attunement side. But a lot of structure there when he is really engaging one of his followers and pushing as he says over and over in the scene, give me your very best. He says that like 15 times you're very best, you're not quitting. So I think whether you're literally on all fours, screaming at a football player, or if it's just something that your followers can feel when they're around you, you either drive people towards excellence or you do not. That's what we want to talk about today. Yeah. And I agree with that, Ryan. If I'm going to be vulnerable and jump in this with my leadership piece, I will get to the relational part. But this structural part has been a piece I've had to work on even just in recent weeks about being very clear what I expect, what I want, what I need. Because if I'm going with you talk about the vulnerability piece, if I'm not rude and aground it sometimes my leadership can skew because I don't want relational difficulty with my followers or whomever is reporting. Because this structure part will make you have to borrow from connection a little bit. And it'll touch in some places in me about like conflict resolution. But I can definitely see it, but I can see where it hurts followers too. Even when I was a professor, I could be a very relational professor, but students need to know there are due dates, there are penalties for it for not keeping up with it. And when they don't have that, it can't create chaos in the people who are following like, where are you going, where are you taking me? I don't think you know how to drive the ship. Yeah. And when you have that, or when you have the sense from followers that there's not some structure here that someone's not driving the ship, instantly the whole team becomes unsafe. And when people are unsafe, that's our taco therapeutic side comes to mind here, the limbic system in the brain kicks on, people go into fight or flight. And in many ways, you get the very worst of everyone. That's right. And then a lot of times as leaders, and I've been an ineffective leader before, you look at it, your followers and go, man, we're not very good. Our attitudes aren't right, people are coming in late, people are not given their best work and not realize that we're actually inadvertently producing that same culture that doesn't work. Right. So not that we're blaming ourselves, it's that we want to make space for our own experience as well. But it's something we can always be improving on. That's good, right? And I appreciate you being able to do that. We don't have to shame ourselves, but we do need to examine ourselves to be able to say, like, okay, I can look at them and I can put it to them, but then it's coming to going back to what we've been talking about, what's happening in me and where am I out of balance at? And it's not about just balance either, like they always have to be this 50, 50, I think I'm hearing you say, there are sometimes in certain seasons and times you might have to go into the structure a little bit more and be there for a moment and then come back over to the relational side. That's right. We're always going back and forth, whether we know it or not, and we're going to talk a lot about that at the first of next week. It goes without saying that you cannot push a follower without some relational equity. We'll talk more about that next week, but this week we want to talk about what kind of, what kind of pushes attachment science suggests might be helpful. But I like, it is really, really important that we recognize that we're always borrowing back and forth. You know, let's go back into this, try to get specific here. Part of the structure piece of leadership is seeing the potential in your followers. And at times, pushing people to do things they don't think they can. As Sue Johnson says, one of our mentors on the psychotherapeutic side, no risky, no getty, and that's true in relationships and it's true in organizations. Most people don't think that they can do what they have the potential to do. So oftentimes it's the leader that has to see it and has to be with them, but also encourage them to lean into hard things. Otherwise many, many people will just stay stuck to the rest of their life and how tragic is that? That all they needed was a leader who can see that in them and the guts and the courage to say, yes, you can and you're going to and we're going to do it together. And so in that push, in that pushing people to fulfill is also discipline. I'm reminded of Lou Holtz, a famous football coach at Arkansas, Minnesota, Notre Dame. He won a national championship at Notre Dame and I think it was Jason Taylor who was a starting offensive lineman. He's like, I didn't like coach Holtz at points. You love him now because we won a national championship. But at the time, he would just sort of obsess over detail. So Notre Dame was sponsored by Adidas. If you know the Adidas logo is the three stripes, I think it is. And when they were in the huddle, he would make them line up their stripes. And so if you didn't have your stripes lined up, you couldn't break the huddle. He would just make you do push ups. And so it seems so silly, right, to focus on such a random detail. And yet they won a national championship because it creates this culture of excellence. It creates this culture of attention to detail. But every organization needs that, but a lot of them do. You be in a military guy. I don't know how many times in active combat, you break into a marching sequence, not very often. And yet everybody in the military learns to march. Why is that James? Just what you just said there, Ryan, like that leader has to tell, he has to let us know that there is structure to life. And one thing we also call in the military, we call standardization. Even when we were sitting classrooms, everybody's coffee cup had to be on the same side of the table, the same approximation, folders, books and everything. And if it was off, the leader would call it out. He had to call it out. I remember when I was being trained in the military as a leader, one time I got in trouble because hey, they said, either you can live by those stripes or you can die by those stripes, which one are you going to choose. And what you're saying is it's a high cost of leadership. And if you fail to do your job as a leader, it's going to cost you some harm. It's going to cost people that you lead some harm. So it is definitely that sense of structure going into battle. Because then when chaos hits, that's where we're going with attachment. Because attachment is about a distress map, a distress model, and we talked about last time threat mitigation. If a leader, if there isn't that sense of that you can structure, you can come into chaos and provide order. When the battle does come, when your company, your family, your team is tested, then that's where that lack of structure will show up. Good. Yeah. But the thing is also what you're saying is if you can train followers to trust you and train them to focus on details and small things, they'll handle the big day. That's right. Most people don't perform as they want to. They perform as they're trained and as they practice. So that's what we're focusing on. We're trying to just sort of paint a picture of structure. This is obvious, but the reality is to embrace the role of leadership means you're willing to embrace imbalance because you're constantly imbalanced and it's about adaptation as we'll talk about in just a moment. So it's about pushing people for more than they think they can do, seeing their potential, getting them to take measured risks and doing it alongside them. We said this last week, I think, but if you ask a show of hands for what leader they remember, almost universally, it's actually not the relationally attuned leader. It's the one that pushed them and you could argue that's going to be good or bad, sometimes that's because that region of your brain, your limbic system, it only really activates in the face of distress, which is kind of an attachment truth anyway. Most of us remember the coach, teacher, sometimes a parent, sometimes a boss or mentor who pushed them and pushed them and a lot of times people can't realize their potential until they see it in someone else's eye. That's an attachment truth that we're trying to emphasize here. So moving along to me, the ultimate structure of a healthy attachment-based structure leader, it's actually modeling. The fact is, you can't fake leadership. You cannot take followers further than you've gone and they are following you. The question is, is that good news or bad news? It's so easy as leaders to want to sort of take their self out of this and focus on content, whether you're an accountant or a finance person or maybe you're good at business and you just want your people to focus on their tasks and their roles. That's not possible. Due to attachment truths, people are following people all the time. We know that from a scientific standpoint. With a brain aspect, we won't go into the details of this called mirror neurons, but the human brain is constantly paying attention to signals, mimicking the behavior, the emotional state of the other. The fact is, most athletic teams play the game a lot like their coach. It's amazing and it's weird. Yeah, I played years ago for a guy who I actually love the guy, but you know, by his own admission, he was an addict and his moods were sporadic and guess how we played. There were games where we look like the best team in the world and then the next game we couldn't even get as like, this is crazy how this happens and looking back 20 years later, you're going, man, our performance was just like him. That's the structure that we're talking about. It's like the people are following their leader, right? You want to jump in on that or would you go? Yeah, I think it was a part you said a moment ago about leaders sometimes wanting to remove themselves and I was listening to a talk the other day and the guy was kind of challenging this idea that sometimes in eight companies and organizations, we promote, we promote good managers sometimes or performers, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're leaders. And so when they come into that leadership role, what they know is, hey, I got here by doing XYZ and performing an action. So just do, do, do, do, do, do, do, but it's okay to promote those people, but then also finding a way to help train them and kind of what we're hoping to do on this podcast even right is to help people refine that so they could actually know and I'll tell you said at the beginning, what really motivates people? And I think even some of you out there that are saying, well, I was that person that was promoted because of performance. Maybe I could sell something, I could build something, I could do something, but it's okay. I think the way is which I'm here and you say Ryan is maybe you can find that person that helped you get to that place. There was some leader that maybe you modeled, that mentor that you that came alongside you and how do you reproduce that same model of, of connection that got helped you get to that place and then go do that with other people and motivate them to get the best out of them in this structure. Exactly. And one of the pieces that is universal just like attachment is work ethic. And so the leader must have a good work ethic. That can look different in different situations. It's someone who works 100 hours a week, most of the time not actually because when someone over works things, usually that's actually a statement of insecurity, right? That's not coming from a place of healthy, balanced passion. That's coming from a place of, you know, I'm trying to disprove my wounds or feel some empty void inside of me. So the work is impressive, but it's not, it's not, it doesn't create trust. It doesn't create followership, in fact, it creates a sense of lack of safety. So sometimes too much work ethic actually has the opposite effect, but, you know, so it's a ditch on either side of the road, right? But if a leader does not work very, very hard in their personal life or the way they approach the role or job, then they're going to have people that do that as well. So I think it's really, really important that the leader pursues excellence, whatever you're doing, and that's contagious. People are drawn to excellence, people are drawn to beauty. I think it's innate in us. I think it's attachment related or perhaps some kind of spiritual truth, but people are drawn to excellence. And so when a leader is passionate and he and he or she just conveys that, people can't help but be drawn to that. And that's half the battle. In fact, sometimes that's almost all it takes on the structure side, a leader who's passionate about something that can, can also come over and sort of attune, honestly, they usually win. Yeah. I think when I think about that, there's a couple of names that jump out my head and I hate to keep saying this name, but I do have to say it is even about Sue. Sue loves what she does. And when you talk to Sue and she's like, I hate when people ask me when I'm going to retire, I love what I do. And her excitement is contagious and you see it in the people around Sue, her trainers and other people who are in her organization, that same passion overflows and so she pursues it with this relentlessness. And I think about Coach Popp of it to the spurs. He doesn't seem like a very warm and daring guy, but he actually is. But he is like his players like Coach Popp will always get the best out of you. I'm so glad you said that. That's great. It brings back memories. And I was coached by some people years ago as a college athlete and because there's many ways to to exude passion. You can be someone who's very vocal and yell and scream, that kind of person. You can also do it more subtly, which was more of my style. So I had a coach who tried to force me to lead and show passion ways that weren't me. And it just backfired on the whole thing at my worst year ever because he was trying to make me into him, right? Which again, we're all learning right now, you know, it's in the past sort of. But seriously, there's many ways to do that. You think about Bill Belichick, you know, he gives the worst interview on the planet. But there's no question he's passionate, right? So, so it's not about learning to express passion, it's really about having the passion. That's right. If you have it, you can't really hide it. That's right. And if you don't have it, you can't lie and make that happen. So, so I want to pause there and say, if you're in a leadership role and you reach a place where you're like, if I'm honest, I'm not, I've lost my passion right now, you need to go get help, go get a retreat, go see a therapist, take some vacation, redefine your goals, go find a life coach, because we think that we can hide it and there's no such thing as hiding it. So the next piece I want to talk about is integrity. That's back to this modeling, healthy structure of a balanced leader. You know, if a leader cuts corners, that creates, that takes the safety out of the organization. Once again, you take the safety out of the organization, you splinter things everywhere. You get people working from a defensive posture. If another example is escalation, you've ever seen a leader who escalates easily, someone questions their authority. Next thing, you know, their move is to escalate. That's an integrity compromise, safety's taken away, instantly right off the bat. So when you have work ethic, when you have passion, when you have integrity, which means I do right for the sake of doing right, I'm not going to cut corners. I'm not going to play games in the organization and power games and those kind of weird things that we've probably seen before from leaders. Maybe we've done it ourselves when we were in insecure places. When you have integrity, passion, a work ethic, what you create is a sense of trust. I think about a story when I was growing up, never forget this story. So my dad was who was a Marine, retired Marine and you know, by everything you would think of with that. We were at the river one day and my friend and his dad was there and his dad, an incredible guy, but a very low structure leader, okay? So if you were to look at our two dads, we'd probably compliment each other. My dad was Marine, he was structure, structure, structure. He did okay on the relational piece, sometimes more than others. His other person's dad, super high relational, he's everybody's best friend, which there's some nice parts of that, but a little bit low on structure. So anyway, my friend and we're like 11 years old, something like that. We swim across this little river and we turned towards our dads. And so his dad said, "Hey, come here." And my friend ignored him and just kind of swam around and then so then my dad looks up and he says, "Hey, come here." You heard my dad's voice, so instantly I start swimming, not even thinking, I don't even remember. It was so drilled into me. You did what you were told the first time, right? And so what was funny is, is there was a cotton mouth snake swim right behind us, right? So I was already out of the harm's way because I responded to leadership and anyway, the snake didn't end up killing my friend. It did slide over his shoulder and freaked him out. But as we got back to the bank, it's like, what just happened? So the type of leadership that right kind of structure is about protecting your followers. And when you use that structure, you put people in a place of safety, you create trust, you don't have to tell them to follow you. You just got to walk and they'll follow. And I think that story is one that I use a lot when I think about leadership because people often think that it's just about relationship and know the structures really, really needed. Does that make sense to you? It makes total sense. I'd like that analogy just to say, if I've put that structure in place and I've shown my people that I mean what I say, and when I say something, it really carries weight and value is not just empty, that it is not just about me getting my needs met or about a bottom line for the company, but it's also about their safety and protection. So it means when that leader speaks, I think about leaders like that and it's like what they say carries weight with me, even still today. Absolutely. Alright, so there's a couple more concepts here and we'll wrap up, you know, that structural piece I'm talking about. This is kind of a controversy or word, but I think a healthy sense of fear is important. I actually do. I think, you know, again, if it's fear that takes you away from relationship, then that's not so good. But there's also a kind of healthy fear that's really just about clarity and respect and reverence, that what that does, once again, it creates safety in the team or the organization. And so I think that should be considered, but in order to have that, we just got finished talking about integrity, I want to throw one more word at and that is justice. You know, fairness is a little different than justice. It's hard to be completely fair all the time. Life's not really fair. I, old coach used to say, if you want fair, you'll have to go to the county fair. You know, that's got to right. So, you know, you can't be fair, but you can be just. And so what I mean by that is a few things. A healthy structured leader is non-reactive, right? They're responsive. They take feedback, as we'll talk about in the next episode, but they're not reactive. They don't have something happen and next thing, you know, they've got a brand new policy every 30 seconds, or they're going off and having anger, fits and so forth. I think sometimes it's social justice. I think a healthy leader is looking out for things like diversity, looking out for equality, looking out for how do I see the big picture of how my team and my organization fits to the needs of the community and is a part of doing things right, especially if they were formerly doing things wrong. I think a healthy structured justice kind of energy, they don't threaten very often. You see a leader who has to threaten all the time, you don't really have a leader at all. You know, you've got to go back to the groundwork and restart. So, you know, someone who threatens a lot tends to be someone who doesn't have much safety around them, both internally and externally. Last one on justice, this could be a whole, we should probably do a whole podcast on this one. A healthy structured leader does not triangulate when they're anxious. So, if I have a problem with someone on my team, I should go to that person, preferably one on one, at least at first. It's a bad day when a leader goes to someone else on that same team, because once you involve a third party in a conflict, you have a triangle. Triangles are the fundamental unit of cancer in a team or an organization. And one person, person A, talks to a person C about person B. It's deadly. And it makes sense. It's a way to vent. It's a way to reduce anxiety, but they're deadly. And it breaks really integrity and justice in that piece. You want to comment on that? Are you good? No, I like that justice part. I mean, it made me think I've been at organizations where that leader, particularly the part where you said justice in the reactive component, because when that leader is super reactive, and because they do inherently have power, it makes it, it puts the, a follower at a one-down position to be able to address that reactivity for the leader. And so I remember times like where there's a leader, and they would just, at a moment, you wouldn't know it was coming. They would just go off about something and kind of like, throw out these threats, and then you have no recourse. And so then it left the followers like, hey, we don't even know where this came from. There was no pre-warning. Matter of fact, this leader had just been telling us we're all doing great, then all of a sudden they're ripping us a new one. And so I always felt like I can't be here, because you just never know when it's coming. You have no indicator of when it's coming. It's just blindsided. And even as you say that, you can just, you can tell it's in your memory system, right? Yes. I'm playing therapy. I can feel it in my chest. You know, just in the sound of your voice, you could feel how that took safety away. And when there's no safety, when there's not clarity on your role, when there's not clarity on generally speaking, what to expect. You're just not yourself. You'll never fulfill your position, because you're always playing defense. And so that's one of the marks of an unhealthy leader, is their followers are always playing defense. And you can't score baskets on defense. So that's something that we want to be thinking about here. Last piece for me, James, unless you got something more here, is just a word adaptive. I think that's really, really key, adaptive and practical. I know for me, as you can tell in this podcast, I like to talk. I like ideas, but that's a danger thing for a leader. Sometimes we can over-talk people. Death by meeting is something that you may see in some organizations, and that's not how you want to do this. We want to be adaptive. We want to be practical. We want to be able to make adjustments, even to our structure, which is kind of a theme of this whole podcast, but I want to just reference one piece on the structure side. Within the structure side, I was trained initially in a model of psychotherapy, which was really just about helping change happen. So it's a pretty universal concept called the MRI. It was stood for the Mental Research Institute. It's such a simple concept that I think applies to the structure of leadership. And it was this, when an individual or a group or a team, whatever it is, when someone has a stuck problem that they can't get out of. The first place to look is what have they been trying to do to make it better? That actually makes it worse. We would refer to that as make sure you assess for redundantly failed-attempted solutions. It's unbelievably common for a leader to fall in love and marry an idea. That just doesn't work in this situation. And so what does he or she do, try harder. They continue to do the same thing over and over, even though it doesn't work because they've got, you know, this is the latest book that so-and-so wrote or maybe something that we say on the podcast. It's this lovely idea, which is just not a great fit for that situation, but the leader falls back on how committed they are and just does more of what doesn't work. So we want to be adaptive. I'll never forget this story. It's a true story. I want a long flight somewhere and someone was asking me a question. This kind of, it was a leader. This leadership situation was actually a father who was having an issue with a 16-year-old child. I'm super sleepy. I think I had two sleeping pills. So I'm like, "Really? You're going to make me work right now." And so he starts unpacking this story about a 16-year-old kid and I'm like, "Okay, I guess I got to work." So he starts saying this and so I just say, "Hey, let me ask you a question. Put a piece of paper in a pen out." He's like, "Okay." And I'm like, "When your 16-year-old kid does X, Y, and Z, whatever it is, I want you to write down to three things that you try most often that don't seem to really work." I'm usually a little nicer than this, but I was tired. So he writes them down. I'm like, "Tell me what they are. He reads them off." And they were probably good parenting ideas in some situations, but they weren't working now. He goes, "Well, no, I'm like, then don't ever do those again." And so he laughs. He's like, "Are you serious?" I'm like, "Yeah." If they were working, if they were going to work, they would have worked the first hundred times you tried it. The notion that you're going to try to 105 times and now suddenly it's going to work. So it's a good structural aspect of leadership. Look at your process. If what I'm doing is working, great, keep doing more of it. If what I'm doing is not working, quit doing it. Reset. Get more creative. I know that's almost insultingly simple, and yet it is profoundly common as well. To get caught in one of these feedback loops where you're trying the same thing redundantly over and over and over, that just doesn't seem to work. That's good. It's been a good podcast, Ryan. So hopefully maybe you're that leader and that structure side has been a place that you've naturally felt comfortable, and so we hope that you feel encouraged in this and recognize that good. This does matter. This makes a difference. But then we do want to offer that balance of maybe it's like, "Hey, I really try to stay away from that, but I had no idea that it was really making my followers and organization unsafe." And really what this can hopefully, the positive side of this is this type of talking about leaning to this side of leadership really helps you get the most out of the people that work with you and they really want you to do it. I know this might seem funny. They might even buck against it a couple of times and be a little hurt over it, but they really need it. For sure. For sure. Because it creates safety. Exactly. You get people in clear roles, you get people with safety. You go chase what matters, balance it out with their relational peace, and you change the world. And because we're talking about attachment science on this podcast on leadership and attachment science is about their distress and that leader can come into that distress and create a sense of safety and then that people can go back out and do that job exponentially better than if they were trying to do it like you said while playing defense. Exactly. You got to get people out of defense. So just kind of summarizing our talk today to wrap up, we really covered seven points, seven points of the structure side of attachment science based leadership. One is to be connected personally, who you are is everything when it comes to leadership. And the second piece is permission to push that it's good that pushing people is not mean. It's not rude, depending on how you do it, of course, but it's important. The third one is modeling. How you do it is what's key. The fourth one is that passion that you have, that you're seeking it, that can't be faked, that you get up and you believe in what you're doing, which brings that work ethic. The fifth one is that integrity piece. The sixth one is justice, low threaten, no triangles, not being reactive and the seventh piece is adaptive, looking at your own process, discontinuing things that don't work and finding things that do. Yeah. Thank you so much. I found this podcast helpful and productive in your leadership. Thank you for listening. We hope the principles discussed on this podcast help transform your life and leadership. You can contact us at push the leading edge at gmail.com and follow our Facebook page at push the leading edge. You can follow Ryan Reina on Facebook at Ryan Reina Professional Training and on his website RyanRainerTraining.com you can follow James on Facebook and Instagram at dochawklpc. You can also check out his website dochawklpc.com.