Leading with Heart

John Baird, Edward Sullivan

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780063052949
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Wall Street Journal Bestseller

Two veteran executive coaches help today's leaders learn how to retain and inspire their teams through the one thing their research has found works: Leading with Heart.

In these pages, leadership coachesJohn Baird and Edward Sullivanshare hundreds of hours of research and firsthand accounts of guiding leaders at some of the world's most respected big brands and small startups (Apple, Nike, Google, and Slackto name a few).

Through their coaching and research they uncovered thefive behaviorstransformative leaders engage in to connect authentically with their teams:

• They are aware of their people's needs.
• They help their people to confront the fears that hold them back.
• They understand their own desires and what drives their people.
• They leverage their unique gifts and help people find their own.
• They connect with their core sense of purpose and help people find theirs.

The key to achieving these behaviors is asking the right questions and having conversations that connect you and your employees on the deepest human level—conversations the authors coach you on how to navigate.

At a time when workplaces are struggling to build high morale and connected cultures, Leading with Heart will help leaders to unlock the best version of themselves and those around them with transformative results.

No matter where you are in your career, this book is your launch point to leading with heart. By encouraging you to ignore outdated "leadership hacks" and embrace introspection and growth, Leading with Heart guides you to ask the right questions and find your own answers. Now you too can create a leadership game-plan that is authentic to you and brings out the best in those around you.

1

What Do You Need to Be at Your Best?

When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.

—ALEXANDER DEN HEIJER

Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf did it standing up. Mark Twain and Truman Capote preferred to do it lying down. Ben Franklin and Victor Hugo liked to do it naked, and it’s been said Thomas Edison did it best after a power nap. Maya Angelou enjoyed doing it first thing in the morning, and Barack Obama says he does it best between 10:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones does it only after eating some shepherd’s pie, and Eddie Van Halen liked having a bowl of M&Ms on hand while doing it—once all the brown ones were removed.

Throughout history, the most prolific artists, thinkers, and entrepreneurs have discovered they get their best creative and innovative work done under specific conditions. It’s something unique to each individual—something most of us only figure out through experimentation and observation. If we ever figure it out at all.

You and your teams most likely have your own preferences or requirements for feeling maximally creative, effective, and resilient, whether or not you’ve ever sat down to think about it. Some of your needs may feel unique and quirky, others more typical. But no matter what, taking a good hard look and getting very honest with yourself about what you really need to feel your best—and learning why you often don’t get your needs met—is the foundation of exceptional performance. And learning how to help your teams get their needs met so they can flourish is the cornerstone of exceptional leadership.

According to Abraham Maslow, the grandfather of all needs research, our needs fall largely into two categories: deficiency needs and growth needs. Deficiency needs are those things without which we tend to suffer—food, sleep, water, shelter, basic human connection. Growth needs are those things that we need to feel like we are living to our full potential—belonging, affirmation, intellectual challenge, access to the outdoors, and so on.

Leading with heart is hard emotional labor. We can’t begin the process of learning how to show up emotionally for ourselves and our teams while we are feeling hangry, unrested, unsafe, or uninspired. As coaches, we tend to focus first on helping our clients understand and calibrate their own needs. Once they have optimized their own needs profile, they are in a better place to get curious about their team’s needs and help them flourish, as well.

Our goal in this first chapter is to help you see more clearly the practices, conditions, and environmental factors that you and your team need to feel your most energized, resourceful, and resilient. Also, we hope you will gain awareness around what things sap your energy, kill your creative juices, or make you more risk-averse.

Even more important than gaining that awareness, however, is having conversations around what stands in the way of getting your own needs met, and how you can help your teams get theirs met. Through a series of stories and exercises, we will seek to help you better understand what these unconscious or unexpressed needs really are and give you some baseline language to begin to have conversations about your needs.

The Needs System: Building upon Maslow

---

As coaches, we think about needs as an integrated system. In contrast to the hierarchy of needs that Maslow first developed in 1943 that included food, water, shelter, love, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization, our Needs System model has three main components: physical needs, emotional needs, and environmental needs.

We noticed in our work with clients that our needs are not necessarily met in the linear hierarchy first proposed by Maslow, in which physical needs must be met before emotional needs, and so on. We’ve found that we can actually have some higher needs met while not getting other lower needs met. Later in his life, Maslow came to the same conclusion, and recent research supports this theory.

We see this phenomenon at play both in companies where we coach and in our travels. In some parts of the developing world, we’ve met people who barely had their basic food and shelter needs met, yet they seemed to be filled with joy and laughter because their emotional needs of connection and community had been met in spades. Additionally, different people have different requirements for various types of needs. Deciphering that unique “needs map” for ourselves and others unlocks our ability to dive deeper into the Leading with Heart model.

As outlined above, we think about needs at three levels. First, we’ve found that high-performing leaders have physical needs far beyond the basics required to survive; they want to thrive. Thus they often have additional needs, such as diets and sleep schedules calibrated to their unique bodies, tailored exercise routines, and mindfulness practices. We’ll get more into the specifics later, but let’s just say for now that you are not crazy for saying things like “I really need to work out today.” We believe you. That is an actual need.

Second, high performers are at their best when their emotional needs to belong, be safe, and have autonomy are met, although we all require different levels of each. Some people are lone wolves, while others require constant interaction and feedback. Some people thrive with lots of autonomy, while others like daily direction. The one thing we all require, however, is psychological safety, and we will explore how to create that.

Finally, in addition to these physical and emotional needs, the Needs System includes an important component we hinted at previously: environmental needs. Maslow’s talks and writing from the 1970s include mentions of his increasing awareness of “aesthetic needs,” but our model takes it a bit further than that, based largely on recent research and our own experience.

Physical Needs

---

We’re going to operate under the assumption that if you are holding this book in your hand, you likely have most of your baseline needs met. You have access to food and shelter, you get decent sleep from time to time, and you got enough human connection as an infant to avoid withering away.

Given that, the big questions in our minds around physical needs are: What beyond your baseline deficiency needs do you need to thrive and to flourish? And more importantly, if you are not getting your needs met at that level, why not, and what can we do about it?

There are four key components to your physical needs: what you put in your body, how you rest your body, how you move your body, and how you train your brain. Let’s take a quick look at each of these questions through the experiences of a few clients. Our hope is that through learning about their journeys, you will be able to get honest with yourself about what you really need. We’ll then spend more time digging into why we might not be getting our needs met.

DIET: THE TRULY RANDOM VARIABLE

Legend has it that Elvis once took his private jet from Memphis to Denver to have what he said was the best sandwich in the country: the Fool’s Gold Loaf, a messy pile of peanut butter, bacon, and banana on sourdough grilled to perfection.

In general, the clients we work with have more than quirky or capricious preferences around food. They’ve learned through trial and error that some foods and diets give them energy, while others lay them flat on their backs. The ideal diet should make you feel energized and healthy while still giving you freedom and options. Extremely restrictive diets that feel like a full-time job unto themselves can become time saps for busy executives.

We’re not nutritionists, and we will not begin to tell you or any client what to eat. What we will do is encourage you to engage in a process of radical curiosity to discern what foods work for you and what foods don’t. Let’s take a look at one client who made a surprising discovery about his diet.

Brian was a senior executive we worked with at a Fortune 500 company. For decades he suffered from near-paralyzing migraines, and they were impacting his performance at the office. Not one of the litany of doctors and specialists he hired could figure out what was ailing him. They thought it must be the result of stress and sent him to numerous psychiatrists and therapists. All the experts found was that aside from the migraines, Brian was very healthy both mentally and physically.

During a coaching session, Edward suggested that perhaps it was something Brian was eating and recommended he consult an allergist (Edward has had his own decades-long battle with allergies). After a laborious process, Brian soon learned he was allergic to gluten. Instead of his migraines being caused by some horrible neurological condition, it was his love of pizza and pasta that ailed him. But even armed with this knowledge, he still had the hardest time giving up gluten.

Another client, Amanda, the general counsel at a top-ten tech firm, complained to John in one of her coaching sessions that she felt sluggish and foggy-brained all the time. John performed an analysis of her baseline needs and learned that she was on her own version of a Mediterranean diet. But instead of consuming lots of healthy fruits and veggies, she was drinking half a bottle of red wine every night to fall sleep and having three cups of coffee every morning to wake up.

The constant yo-yo of caffeine and alcohol was wreaking havoc on her metabolism and keeping her from getting restful sleep. She never drank to get drunk, so she didn’t identify as an alcoholic, but still she was unable to kick the habit. She said she and her mother caught up on the phone nearly every night, and they simply enjoyed drinking a little wine together.

How could we help Brian and Amanda change their eating and drinking habits?

SLEEP: THE UNDERESTIMATED NECESSITY

Of the many fables of Silicon Valley, the story of the young entrepreneurs who are so committed that they eschew regular sleep and only take short naps under their desk for weeks on end is one of the most dangerous. So, before we go much further, let us state once and for all: great leaders get enough sleep.

We’ve noticed anecdotally in our client work, and research concurs, that not getting enough sleep leads to irritability, poor decision-making, anxiety, and depression. In fact, not getting enough sleep can lead to even more severe health issues. According to a National Institutes of Health report, sleep deprivation leads to increased risk for hypertension, diabetes, obesity, depression, heart attack, and stroke.

One client who was the head of engineering at a prominent tech company came to us because he was unable to get along with other leaders on this team. As his boss told us, “Doug is brilliant and produces results as an independent contributor, but no one wants to work with him, and I can’t have that.”

John dove into our regular Leadership 360 analysis, in which we aggregate feedback from a client’s colleagues, to assess what was going on, and sure enough, the data matched up with the boss’s sentiments: low EQ, low emotional regulation, not a team player, only out for himself, and not for the company.

John read back the 360 to him in one of their first meetings, and Doug scoffed, “Give me a break! My job is to build product, not get along with people.” The problem is that this young man was up for a promotion and needed to learn to collaborate and lead, not just write code.

“Actually, Doug, I beg to differ,” John replied. “Your new job description explicitly states that you must learn to get along with people and not just write code, so maybe we should figure out what’s going on here.”

Nothing like a good ol’ bucket of ice-cold reality to wake a client up.

Digging in with Doug, John asked him to describe what he needed to do his best thinking. “I like working from midnight to 4:00 a.m. No emails, no Slack. I can finally get in the zone.”

“Great, but when do you sleep?” John inquired.

“Sleep? I’m twenty-eight. I don’t need sleep. I’m good on four hours a night.”

Four hours a night? Almost anyone regularly getting four hours a night is going to be a foul, irritable pain in the rear end.

John was faced with a conundrum, however. The client needed more sleep, but he also got his best work done when he was uninterrupted. Asking him to work regular hours and go to bed at ten or eleven like a normal person wasn’t going to work if other team members were pinging him over email and Slack late into the evening.

EXERCISE: THE CURE-ALL

Justin McLeod, the CEO of dating app Hinge, has a rigorous daily yoga practice that he views as fundamental in helping him show up for the daily struggles of being a start-up founder. When Justin seems a little off on a coaching call, Edward’s first question is, “How is your yoga practice going?” And nine times out of ten, Justin hasn’t done it in a few days. It’s like clockwork.

While w...