DEMAND 100% OF THE TRUTH

Identify a time when you led with 100% of the truth.

What compelled you to lead with 100% of the truth? How hard was it for you?

How did people respond?

What was the outcome? Looking back, would you do anything differently?

Now, think of a time when you didn’t lead with 100% of the truth. Why did you or others choose to leave information out? How did it change the outcome?

How did you feel knowing there was more to include, but it was withheld?

How might the situation have changed if you had considered the three leadership questions and the considerations on getting to 100% of the truth posed in this chapter?

to hold space for the truth, i. This process t can be messy and stressful, but it’s the only way we learn how to build bridges with people who are different from us instead of continuing to remain isolated in our echo chambers.

As we reconcile with the truth, we also must begin the necessary reconnection and recalibration with the middle. The middle is where our power lies and our future takes hold. It is here that we begin the necessary reconnection while rebuilding for the future. It is where we nurture and buoy belonging. By listening to but not overreacting to the extremes, and more fully engaging the moveable middle, we will create an organic movement that builds unity, encourages safe spaces to operate, and supports the most critical and often stable part of your organization. The middle will demand the truth quietly, process the truth internally, and act on the truth through their work and actions. They may not be as vocal or out front as the extremes, but they will do what needs to be done—and when you back it with 100% of the truth, they will do it not their way, but the shared organizational way—your way. This empowers the leader to begin to not only serve but also strengthen their silent weapon—the middle. Arriving at 100% of the truth takes courageous leadership, but it’s vital for the trust that drives belonging.

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CHAPTER 6: Leader of You

Leveraging the Rules for Leaders

There is a collective outcry for human-centered leaders who cement cultures of belonging in their organizations. Leaders are being forced to navigate the swirl of constant change in their personal and professional lives with consequences and outcomes at every turn. Unlike previous times in history, the intensity of the evolving societal and political forces affecting our personal, professional, and family lives have us constantly alert, driven by fear, retreating, and at times afraid to act. Nobody can, or should, lead when their operational preset is “Maybe this will just go away” or “I hope this doesn’t happen to me.”

The belonging leader takes a different perspective: “I want to embrace this, call this out, and start solving this, or learn more about it before it manifests into something different.” Simply hoping something doesn’t happen sets you up to live an accidental outcome. Most of us do this daily without even thinking about it. When we find ourselves afraid to go deep, resisting the need to turn into difficulty and face it directly, we’re hiding from our innate ability to thrive and grow while advancing others along with us.

To be effective today and tomorrow, and twenty years from now, a leader must first deeply understand how to lead themselves. Without that understanding of your own leadership, you will continue doing things that look like leadership but may not empower you to reach your fullest potential. And, when that happens, leaders all too often leave people behind or, worse, out. Reflect for a moment on whom you are leading first: the team or yourself. The leader of you—the only label I believe is appropriate for each of us, regardless of your role, title, or place in life—requires more than your people; it requires you to prioritize yourself first.

Understanding Yourself First

At Deutser, we reject deficit-based leadership and see the value in building upon what is already working, helping leaders understand growth through their strengths. Aligning with our perspective on leading the self, I’m going to take you through a series of insightful and sometimes probing questions and exercises in this chapter that will help you to better explore your own leadership style and begin to populate your personal leadership profile. Building your understanding of the leader of you encourages you to go deeper than the typical “who am I?” Through this self-exploration, we can achieve profound growth.

Question who you really are and what you value as a leader. What differentiates your leadership? How do you reconcile DEI and identity? How do you tether your efforts to a more relevant, sustainable leadership? How do you make sense of competing perspectives (e.g., generational, gendered, racial, cultural, political)? How do you actively leverage positivity not as a mindset but a leadership competency? How do you balance the need for truth and transparency amid the threat of erasure? How do you challenge everything, including a potentially antiquated attachment to winning and losing? How do you approach belonging and bringing people into your space? How do you turn into power and challenge?

Your answer to these questions will differ at different times in your life. Our consultants are trained to see patterns in leaders. To the degree a leader is committed in understanding these areas, the greater likelihood they will have of sustaining success and producing longer-term and more systemic change in their organizations and communities. And the more they will embrace the concepts around what it means to be a belonging leader.

The leader of us and within us relishes challenge. We actively hunt for it and are energized to tackle it head on. We do not back away from challenge; rather, we embrace it. But, sometimes, we get so stuck in the rut of everyday leadership that we put aside for a day, a week, or more the differentiating concepts that define who we are and what we want from our own leadership. To equip you for these moments, this chapter offers exercises, stories, and explorations to make sure you are aligned as the leader you want and need to be—not for others, but for you. We will challenge you to think about what leadership means to you and how belonging leadership aligns with your current leadership style, goals, and expectations of others and yourself.

Great leaders perpetually search for something more. This search, and their passion for what is next, takes them to interesting places—often, back to the most important place, themselves. We have found the most powerful excursion a leader can take is rarely organizational and almost always personal.

It is the great leaders who discover that the best and truest form of leadership lies deep inside each of them—ready to be rediscovered, reoriented, repurposed, and redesigned for today’s challenges. The answers lie within the leader of you.

The Leadership Tether

Leadership doesn’t start at a certain time. It is a current that runs throughout our life, our experiences, and our decisions. It is always evolving. For most of us, it is a continual growth trajectory that is tethered to our past experiences. How we understand those experiences propels us forward to the leader we are going to become. We reject the premise that leaders are born, not made. Instead, we acknowledge that leaders are born and made. I believe everyone is born to lead one—yourself, thus the leader of you. The capacity to lead more people is then determined by your continual reflection, work, and growth.

The foundations and fundamentals for leadership are often evident at a young age. Yet, when we work with leaders, they talk about their more recent leadership experiences first, because they seem more substantial or relevant. Many of us ignore our early experiences and how they inform later decisions through our style of leadership, especially regarding how and what we trust in ourselves and others. After all, most of us are bombarded by the “What have you done for me lately?” mentality in leadership that never slows down enough to let us off the merry-go-round of proving ourselves. Reflecting on the influence of experiences and exposure to input and ideas that have brought you to where you are today is an interesting exercise.

The leadership tether is an accessible, important tool that leaders can use to intentionally consider the entirety of their leadership—past, present, and future. Sound like a familiar plot to a classic holiday story? Sometimes you need an awakening to see your patterns and reignite earlier fires within you that stoked earlier successes. The leadership tether will provide a thoughtful inventory of your earliest experiences, your wins and losses, your high and low points, and all that influenced your way here, where you are now.

The tether is personal. I am asked, “What made you put what you did on your tether?” My tether is made up of awards, recognitions, leadership highlights and lowlights, accomplishments, milestones, and life events that have shaped and defined me as a leader. There are so many important things in my life that have supported (and at times derailed) me as a leader, even if they were just moments. I have learned that by identifying them and putting them on paper, I can connect past experiences to the way I lead today and to the leader I plan to become. The tether has been central to how I think about belonging. It creates a picture of where I fit, where I did not fit, and where I invited people in and left them out. The experiences provide an undeniable measure of clarity of who I have been as a genuine belonging leader.

It is why I started my leadership tether with my earliest memory of leadership: being given the “Best Rester Award” in kindergarten and earning my first paycheck at seven years old (Royal Homes, $7). It was the first time that I remember being recognized, regardless of what the recognition was for. There are other points of recognition on my tether, including receiving humanitarian awards, being recognized on National Philanthropy Day, or being selected to lead challenging work. Recording them on a tether reveals the interconnectedness that links each of these experiences to the nuanced and challenging work I do today.

The following sections categorize some of the other defining moments of my tether.

Experiencing Personal Belonging

There are experiences on my tether that launched great periods of belonging for me and, by extension, others. I think about my eleven years working at Camp Greylock, the oldest private boys’ camp in the country, where I worked in various leadership capacities to coach, teach, and mentor hundreds of young men. Those experiences were the precursors for my work coaching athletes, leading the Houston Texans’ cultural transformation, guiding a controversial intergenerational strategic conversation at Holocaust Museum Houston, and finally gaining membership in the Young Presidents’ Organization. There are other experiences that highlight belonging.

• It may seem counterintuitive that someone who coaches elite executives across the world would be intimidated by coaching elite college athletes—but that is what happened when I first began coaching players—that is, until they immediately bought in and made me feel part of the team.

• One of the earliest and most transformational experiences in my professional career came shortly after I was fired from my job with a wife, two children under three years old, and a new dream house. I was aggressively recruited to work for a Historically Black College and University. Surprisingly, it became my first client. I share details on this story in chapter four.