Praise for Leadership Is a Relationship
“Mike Erwin hasn’t just studied leadership—­he’s lived it. In this book,
he and Willys DeVoll highlight how the connections leaders forge
matter every bit as much as the visions they deliver.”
—­ADAM GRANT, #1 New York Times bestselling author of
Think Again and host of the WorkLife with Adam Grant podcast
“Leadership Is a Relationship is both timely and timeless, and makes a
strong case for why it’s so important for us to positively influence the
people we lead and love. This book’s message is one that we all need
to hear, and challenges and empowers us to put people first amid the
relentless pace of life and the distractions we all encounter in life today.”
—­ELISABETH HASSELBECK, Emmy-­winning broadcaster
and New York Times bestselling author
“This book offers accessible ideas and effective methods for anyone
looking to grow as a leader. Mike and Willys share real-­life examples to
help underscore the benefits of relationship-­based leadership in your
work—­and life. Leadership Is a Relationship can help you cut through
the noise of navigating an increasingly challenging digital world and
instead focus on the strength of your connection to others.”
—­HARPREET RAI, CEO of Oura Health
“This excellent book reinforces what I believe to be the most crucial
senior leader skill: building and developing relationships. As a four-­star
combatant commander, this is where I spent the vast majority of my
time and how I principally contributed to our mission. A must-­read for
all leaders, and especially those with large, diverse organizations where
you depend on others for success.”
—­JOSEPH VOTEL, Retired Four-­Star U.S. Army General and
former Commander of U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special
Operation Command
“This book serves as a powerful guide on how to become an effective
leader by building authentic relationships with others. Our business
has always placed an emphasis on family, employees, community, and
connection. Leadership Is a Relationship provides impactful strategies
and tactics that will help any business continue to foster growth for
future generations.”
— JENNIFER YUENGLING, vice president
of operations at Yuengling and sixth-generation brewer
L E A DE R S H I P
IS A
R E L AT ION S H I P
MICHAEL S. ERWIN | WILLYS DEVOLL
L E A DE R S H I P
IS A
R E L AT ION S H I P
How to Put People First in the Digital World
Copyright © 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data
Names: Erwin, Michael S., author. | DeVoll, Willys, author.
Title: Leadership is a relationship : how to put people first in the
digital world / Michael S. Erwin, Willys DeVoll.
Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., [2022] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021043986 (print) | LCCN 2021043987 (ebook) | ISBN
9781119806134 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119806141 (adobe pdf) | ISBN
9781119806158 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Leadership. | Interpersonal relations. | Organizational
behavior.
Classification: LCC HD57.7 .K4773 2022 (print) | LCC HD57.7 (ebook) | DDC
658.4/092—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021043986
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Cover Design: Paul McCarthy
For everyone who puts people first
Contents
Introduction: Relationships Under Siege
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
xi
The Right Amount of Tension (Accountability)
1
Forgiveness Every Day (Forgiveness)
25
Jump Back Together (Resilience)
43
The Vocabulary of Trust (Trust)
65
From Pie in the Sky to History
(Coalition-­Building)
87
The Long and Winding Road (Loyalty)
109
Stable Ground (Stability)
131
Start Leading with Relationships
157
Acknowledgments
173
Notes
177
About the Authors
187
Index
189
ix
Introduction: Relationships
Under Siege
T
his is a book of stories. Let’s start with one of yours.
Remember the last time you went out to dinner with someone, whether it was a single companion or a rollicking party of
old friends. You sat down at the table, and then what happened?
Humor us for a moment: close your eyes and recall that scene as
vividly as you can. Try to imagine every little detail, from what
you ordered to the decor of the restaurant to the clothes that
your fellow diners wore.
Once you’ve got that picture, think about how you all
engaged with each other. What was the conversation like? How
much of your attention did you give to your companions? Did
someone pull out their phone and place it on the table? (Maybe
that someone was you. Don’t worry—­this is a safe space.) Did
anyone glance down at a smartwatch during the meal, checking
something that clearly wasn’t the time? Did a member of your
party look up from their lap and say, without any context, “Oh
my goodness, you have to see this,” before showing you a video
of a squirrel riding a remote-­control car? Did someone forget
what the rest of you were talking about because they were busy
watching muted sports highlights on the TV over the bar?
xi
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Introduction: Relationships Under Siege
Maybe your meal didn’t include any of these scenes. It might
have been an elegant combination of good food, good company,
and good conversation, all uninterrupted by outside distractions.
For many, many people in the developed world, that wouldn’t
have been the case. The siren song of phone-­sized distractions
proves so attractive, so irresistible, and so ostensibly harmless
that we as a culture have largely accepted such interludes into
our time with others. Even if it isn’t in particularly good taste,
the occasional phone-­check during a dinner out is now thoroughly unremarkable. “Everyone” does it.
Who can blame us? Digital distractions are really, really
appealing. They give us a little hit of satisfaction, and it’s hard
not to indulge ourselves. They often claim to give us information
that’s time-­sensitive and important.1 They’re (mostly) socially
acceptable, too. And because they’re both seductive and accepted
in social situations, digital distractions are a large and growing
presence in our interactions with other people.
Dinner out is just one way to think about how deeply digital distractions have embedded themselves into our lives. Think
about the family dinner, the car ride with a sibling or co-­worker,
the quick errand to the convenience store around the corner.
Spaces that used to require face-­
to-­
face conversation—­
and
that therefore used to kindle our relationships with both loved
ones and strangers—­are now opportunities to check on emails,
tweets, tags, DMs, sports scores, hot takes, the newest deal on
denim . . . you name it. Beautiful phones and almost ubiquitous
internet access have opened virtually every event to extraneous
information. Our grandparents often experienced situations in
which they had to either shoot the breeze with the folks around
them or make the uncomfortable choice to sit in silence. In those
Introduction: Relationships Under Siege
xiii
same situations today, we can effortlessly learn what the Canadian
prime minister is doing or watch on-­demand highlights from
last night’s basketball games. The old carve-­outs for sociality—­
for relationship-­building—­are open to distraction. The siege on
relationships is well underway.
The average American spends more than four hours a
day on their phone.2 The digital economy has given us amazing stuff. Some of the world’s most brilliant content creators,
software engineers, and behavioral economists spend each day
making your phone an even more compelling option for your
time and attention. We can’t get enough, and for many of these
tech products, we can’t get enough of communicating with each
other. There’s a beautiful humanity to that. Life in the Information Age engages the best parts of us, from our curiosity and
energy to our creativity and desire to love. It’s no wonder that in
less than one generation, we’ve completely reshaped the inputs
of our experience—­with the universe at our fingertips, smartphones have become a pillar of society.
Seductive digital offerings don’t just take time away from
the time-­tested actions that build relationships. They also pull
a clever sleight of hand. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok,
and other social network products promise human connection in
radical ways, and at radical scale. Their marketing and communications strategies sell their apps as pioneering ways to be “more
connected” to people around you and around the world, and they
allow us to communicate with people we’d never meet otherwise.
But their actual goal, their raison d’être, is something else entirely.
They’re built to hook you on their universe of connected apps,
maximize the amount of time you spend on their platforms, and
remove you from social interactions in the physical world. The
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Introduction: Relationships Under Siege
better they are at doing so, the more ads they can show you, and
the more money they can make for their shareholders. A former
Facebook executive told a group of business students that “the
short-­term, dopamine-­driven feedback loops we’ve created are
destroying how society works,” before letting them know that
he doesn’t allow his kids anywhere near social media.3 Every
minute that you spend staring at a screen instead of talking to a
friend is a minute in which tech companies can show you more
revenue-­generating ads. Your face-­to-­face time is their next business opportunity.
Are smartphones the end of our social lives? Of course not.
When we say that the modern attention economy has laid siege
to relationships, we aren’t suggesting that we’re a few years away
from all living in abject isolation. Instead, relationships are under
siege because meeting, getting to know, and caring for other people has never required more deliberate intention. As the technology scholar Dr. Sherry Turkle notes, the mere presence of
a phone even if we’re not interacting with it changes the kinds of
topics that people talk about. If we see a phone, we tend to talk
about less substantive things, and we tend to report less connection with our conversation partner.4
We’re feeling the consequences of that watering-­
down.
Turkle describes how the college students she studied yearn
for more time together and completely divorced from phones.
Young people appreciate much of what technology offers, but
also wish that it were less invasive in their relationships:
I interview college students who text continuously in each other’s presence yet tell me they cherish the moments when their
friends put down their phones. For them, what counts as a special
Introduction: Relationships Under Siege
xv
moment is when you are with a friend who gets a text but chooses
to ignore it, silencing his or her phone instead.5
As we’ve gotten superficial access to billions of people
around the world, technology has clawed our attention away
from those around us. We might be able to communicate with
everyone, but it’s difficult to get close to anyone.
Relationship Complexity
With new distractions and methods of communication, relationships exist in several different realms: the Facebook friendship, the Twitter reply, the Instagram like, the WeChat thread,
the group text, and, you know, the old-­fashioned, face-­to-­face
conversation or lengthy phone call. Our not-­so-­distant ancestors had a couple of ways to communicate with friends and loved
ones, and they weren’t available at every hour of the day. We, on
the other hand, can’t even name all of the different options we
have for sending someone a message—­and each of those channels
requires a different style of communication. Speaking a tweet in
actual conversation would be bizarre, and the style of an Instagram comment is a whole lot different (and emoji-­laden) than
what you might send the same person in a handwritten note.
Let’s call this dizzying phenomenon relationship complexity: relationships have become much more complex as a direct
consequence of the number of communication channels, styles,
and expectations that the twenty-­
first-­
century economy has
produced. Even the most earnest, compassionate, and energetic
person has a more complicated social landscape today than they
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Introduction: Relationships Under Siege
would have just 10 or 20 years ago . . . let alone 50. Although
it’s hard to say exactly how much more convoluted relationships
have become, the proliferation of information tech has upped
complexity by orders of magnitude.
Complexity itself isn’t bad, but relationship complexity is
very hard to manage on a daily basis. As creatures that didn’t
evolve beside such overwhelming stimuli, we’re understandably
struggling. The United States is just one of several developed
countries with a well-­documented epidemic of loneliness and
weakened relationships. The 2020 Cigna Loneliness Survey, one
of the most-­cited measures of sociality in America, found that 61
percent of Americans are lonely.6 That figure comes from before
the pandemic. As Covid-­19 shut the world down and forced us to
stay in our homes, it also illustrated just how far technology still
is from effectively replacing face-­to-­face relationships. Unlike
other kinds of disasters and heartbreaks, the pandemic was cruelly well-­suited to threaten our relationships. Shared spaces, from
schools to gyms to community centers to restaurants, shuttered.
Many haven’t and won’t return. Weddings, funerals, and bedside
consolation for the sick—­age-­old rituals of connection—­became
impossible. A huge number of jobs became remote positions. It’s
important to reiterate this particular torture of the pandemic: on
top of all of its monstrous tolls, it exponentially accelerated the
trend away from communal, face-­to-­face experiences and toward
physical and emotional isolation. What the smartphone created,
the pandemic amplified.
As we dive deeper into our own personalized digital worlds,
social and political polarization continue to rise and threaten
not only our social institutions, but also our sense of common
Introduction: Relationships Under Siege
xvii
purpose. And, of course, understanding and adapting to technological innovation is hard because technology just keeps changing. With the convergence of both the overstimulation and
pandemic crises, we’re beginning to appreciate in vivid detail just
how much 24/7 information overload has affected us.
It’s disingenuous to present the problem du jour as both terrifying and unprecedented. The old “kids these days . . .” quip
highlights the very real phenomenon of recency bias—­as humans,
we tend to overstate the importance of what just happened, and
the threat of technology’s intrusion into our personal lives is no
exception.7 Without panic or hyperbole, we want to convince you
that the conditions of modern, plugged-­in life pose a powerful
but nonetheless addressable threat to creating and growing relationships. The average American already watches TV four times
longer each day than they spend socializing and communicat­
ing with others.8 Our everyday interactions and pastimes are
filled with devices and systems that didn’t exist even 15 years ago,
and compelling new inventions hit the market more than ever.
The history of humanity is rife with challenges, many of
which we’ve overcome. We’re not interested in fear-­mongering
or hand-­wringing. These particular challenges to relationship-­
building, though, are new and distinctly ours. We can surmount
them, but first we need to understand and define them.
Connecting in the Digital Economy
Modern connectivity has also muddied the border between
work and personal time, as many workers experienced during
the pandemic lockdowns. We don’t switch off our psychological
xviii
Introduction: Relationships Under Siege
attachment to digital distractions when we walk through the
office doors or begin a Zoom meeting—­we love to check our
devices, whether we’re in the bedroom or at our desks. That
becomes a serious problem when it hurts our ability to do the
complex work of communicating with our colleagues.
Remember the dinner story at the beginning of this chapter? Let’s think about the work version now. Recall a typical one-­
on-­one conversation from your working life. How often is the
conversation interrupted by you or your co-­worker checking a
device?
Willys worked with a senior executive who scrolled on his
phone throughout conversations with his direct reports, and
even with people who’d just received offers to join the company.
There are few better ways to imply that you couldn’t care less
about the person you’re talking to. The leader who doesn’t diligently avoid distractions will, however unknowingly and with
whatever generous intentions, sacrifice strong team relationships
for the illusory thrills of a smartphone. That’s a recipe for compromised performance in the short term and an isolating lack of
meaningful relationships over time.
However you feel about talking to someone who can’t
be bothered to put down their phone and look you in the eye,
this kind of distraction-­addled talk is simply less effective than
focused conversation. Information is lost, and so are potential
relationships. In the early years of the iPhone, the late Stanford
communications professor Dr. Cliff Nass pioneered research
on the psychological effects of multitasking. He began with
the hypothesis that people who did lots of things at once—­like
switching between browsing Facebook, scrolling through Instagram, scanning the news, and writing a research paper, all with
Introduction: Relationships Under Siege
xix
music streaming in the background—­became good at doing lots
of things. Like most activities, those who practiced regularly
would build skill. His research, however, convincingly pointed in
the opposite direction:
The people we talk with continually said, “Look, when I really
have to concentrate, I turn off everything and I am laser-­focused.”
And unfortunately, they’ve developed habits of mind that make
it impossible for them to be laser-­focused. They’re suckers for
irrelevancy. They just can’t keep on task.
This phenomenon wasn’t fleeting, either:
Our brains have to be retrained to multitask and our brains, if
we do it all the time—­brains are remarkably plastic, remarkably
adaptable. We train our brains to a new way of thinking. And then
when we try to revert our brains back, our brains are plastic but
they’re not elastic. They don’t just snap back into shape.9
Nass wasn’t sure whether this frenetic, lack-­of-­focus effect
was permanent or just a sticky flavor of temporary. He did find
that the self-­proclaimed multitaskers weren’t really multitaskers
at all: they were just constantly distracted people, and they never
did anything with full concentration. Much of Nass’s research
came before 2010. Constant distraction as a sociological phenomenon has skyrocketed since, with more powerful devices,
more hypercolorful screens, and more years of fully funded
attention engineering.
Distracted people are a fixture of the modern workplace,
but the structure of work itself has also changed dramatically
over the past generation. The kinds of work that exist, the skills
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Introduction: Relationships Under Siege
that fetch the highest pay (or any at all), and the physical environment of the average workplace all look very different than
they did even in the early 2000s.
Many of the changes to professional life are clearly positive,
and that’s partially thanks to a slate of creative, productive, and
diverse new jobs. The artist who creates in geographic obscurity
until they find a niche following online didn’t exist until very
recently. The same goes for people in economically ravaged
places: the decentralization of work and the democratization of
creative tools have exponentially increased the number of people
who can develop and display their talents. Any forward-­thinking
firm can now make a tempting offer to a skilled person in a faraway area: work for us and stay right where you are. Keep your
home and lifestyle, and collect the high compensation that we’d
pay to a similar candidate who lives in a much more expensive
city. Just make sure that you have a fast and reliable internet connection, and enjoy the benefits of remote work.
But pandemic lockdowns showed us that the liberation of
remote work also makes everyday sociality much more difficult.
Early in the pandemic, the health journalist Jamie Ducharme
talked to people frustrated by how inadequate video chats felt:
Jessica Pflugrath, a 27-­year-­old freelance writer and editor who
lives alone in Brooklyn, New York, has been relying on video chats
to stay connected with her friends, but she says they bring a nagging feeling of unease. The ebb and flow of an in-­person conversation doesn’t always translate to video, and she doesn’t like the
pressure of having to be “on” all the time; she also doesn’t like how
easily digital conversations lend themselves to distraction. “There’s
a lack of feeling present with people, in general,” she says.10
Introduction: Relationships Under Siege
xxi
That’s not surprising. For thousands of years, our species
evolved around close interaction with each other. Our ancestors
studied each other’s body language, tone, and energy to understand their social standing and the subtle cultural information
that was necessary for everyday survival.
The richness of an in-­person interaction depends on the
innumerable factors we perceive from our companion’s cadences,
facial movements, posture, smell, touch, and proximity. This is
true throughout the animal kingdom, in fact: as we learn more
about both ourselves and our relatives in nature, we begin to
build a more vibrant picture of the myriad methods animals have
for understanding each other.11
When we communicate in ways that don’t capture these
subtle, nonverbal inputs, we lose a lot of what our brains want
to know about others. We lose the stuff of great poetry and salient memories—­the way your dad wrinkled his face right before
telling a joke, the little tap on the shoulder an important teacher
would always give after a job well done—­and we lose a treasure
trove of subconsciously processed, vital information about the
behavior and beliefs of others. All of these tiny pieces of information gradually form attachment to another living being. These
are the fundamental bits that become a relationship.
If we want to create a world where people can work remotely,
be productive, and enjoy flourishing social lives, we need to find
ways to translate these little details to physically distributed
work. Mindlessly scheduling video calls won’t cut it. Clever leaders can make it work, and the pandemic inspired widespread
experimentation with remote relationship-­building. We have to
recognize the value of relationships, engage with other people,
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Introduction: Relationships Under Siege
and continuously find new ways to care about each other in a
culture that increasingly commodifies and isolates us.
After all, bad actors can co-­opt the immense promise of
flexible work. Remote and gig work can be a shortcut for the
callous boss who wants to get a job done quickly, cheaply, and
without any other considerations. Outsourcing tasks to anonymous remote workers can cut costs by taking advantage of different regional expectations about pay or the value of a particular
skill. You can get those pesky few lines of code taken care of by
an unmet freelancer who lives . . . well, it doesn’t matter where,
does it? Get it done, pay next to nothing for it, and move along.
Remote work, in other words, can be even more exploitative than
traditional employment.
Managers have had the chance to make some version of this
cold, short-­term choice for decades, but it’s never been as easy or
anonymous. As Dr. Alexandrea J. Ravenelle found in her study of
the gig economy, this dynamic can be particularly troubling for
women who are paid to do gig work in the homes of strangers.
Without a network of co-­workers, “most gig workers are independent contractors who need good reviews from the client and
who don’t have access to an open-­door human resources department or colleagues they can complain to.”12 As more and more
workers make their living in roles that require rapid changes
and flexible teams, we have fewer and fewer structures to promote meaningful, long-­term relationships with the people we
work with.
The looming threat of artificial intelligence only exacerbates the same problem. As software and robotic machinery
become capable of outperforming humans in more lines of work,
Introduction: Relationships Under Siege
xxiii
we need ways to keep people employed and engaged in social
life. That problem demands solutions across a wide range of
fields, but relationships stand out as a powerful hedge against
being phased out by AI. If your job relies on your ability to relate
to, empathize with, and care for other people, you’re a lot safer
than someone whose work already approximates the labor of a
machine. The job market of the future is still anyone’s guess, but
it’s hard to imagine automation fully replacing nurses, teachers,
psychologists, or social workers any time soon.
The problem isn’t technology itself. Used thoughtfully,
many of the apps that now steal our attention are capable of
enriching our lives, broadening our worlds, and allowing us to
send a letter to a loved one on the other side of Earth . . . instantly.
It isn’t bad that remote and gig work exist—­they let millions of
people craft better lives.
It isn’t that relationships will somehow go extinct; the problem is both more nuanced and, because it’s so easy to misunderstand, quite pernicious: it’s never been harder to practice the
kinds of behaviors that build substantive relationships. To build a
meaningful life in relation to others, we have to consciously put
people first in our noisy digital world.
A Way Forward
Examples of real-­world leadership suggest a potent counter to
the chaos of relationship complexity: a renewed commitment
to people. Whereas technology so often pulls us away from
the messy endeavor of relating to others, relationships pull us
together and force us to engage with other minds, experiences,
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Introduction: Relationships Under Siege
and hearts. Meaty relationships keep leaders from caring only
about quarterly metrics and quantified measures of success;
they’re a call back toward the interpersonal and ethical parts of
ourselves. Just as so many other powerful forces in our social and
spiritual lives—­like affection, loyalty, love, trust, and kindness—­
emerge from empathetic connection with others, so too does
leadership. As the tumult of modern life creates lonelier lives,
relationship-­based leadership offers an antidote.
If this sounds simple, that’s because it is. As a society, we just
haven’t decided to take relationships seriously. It’s easy to replace
the time-­intensive behaviors that build relationships with quick
texts and ephemeral messages; it’s easy to replace a social lunch
with a granola bar in front of the computer because we’re “too
busy getting work done.” With team members spread out over
long distances, each working in physical isolation, forward-­
thinking leaders need compassionate solutions for entire teams
now systemically deprived of face-­to-­face interaction with their
peers. Even the most cynical, number-­
crunching leader can
acknowledge that in a world where the job-­for-­life model is
merely a vestige of the past, cultivating durable r­elationships
is just good business. You never know who will pop back into
your life.
The challenges of a device-­
centric world are huge, but
the opportunity to reinvent modern relationships is huge, too.
Whether your goal as a leader is to serve and inspire others,
build and grow a successful organization, or both, we now know
that digital shortcuts aren’t shortcuts at all—­they’re inadequate
substitutes for the work of community. Those leaders who have
chosen to lead not with blunt authority, but instead with an
Introduction: Relationships Under Siege
xxv
unshakable commitment to the people around them, are creating environments of healthy growth and robust social impact. At
work, their teams stay longer, work harder, and thrive. Leaders
who don’t have traditional authority or a formal leadership role
can win hearts, minds, and loyalty while making progress toward
auspicious goals. Relationship-­based leadership is working for
the bottom line and for people, and it’s muffling the noise of our
nonstop technoworld.
In this book, we’ll share stories and tested tips for building
a culture of relationships in the twenty-­first century. We’re not
here to summarize the latest findings in psychology or sociology;
we’re here to showcase examples of how this kind of leadership
actually works. We’ve spoken with role models from a variety
of backgrounds, and whose accomplishments take many forms.
We’ve interviewed educators, military officers, and athletes.
Some are CEOs and generals, but most aren’t. Some don’t even
readily refer to themselves as leaders. What they have in common
is a core belief that other people matter, and that real leadership
starts with that premise. Whereas some people are motivated by
a title or power, the leaders in this book approach leadership as
a natural result of their dedication to the people in their lives.
They are, fundamentally, people looking to serve.
Their stories also show how leading with relationships has
major benefits in seven key areas, each of which has its own
chapter:
• Accountability
• Forgiveness
• Resilience
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Introduction: Relationships Under Siege
• Trust
• Coalition-­building
• Loyalty
• Stability
By the time you’ve reached the end of the book, you’ll have
new strategies with which you, too, can lead through the strength
of your connection to others. At the end of each story, we highlight one key lesson to take back to your life. At the end of each
chapter, we also give you key takeaways and questions for reflection, which you can use to start creating a personalized plan for
maturing your own practice of leadership.
You can read this book cover to cover, and we hope that
you do. But you can also skip between chapters, focusing on the
topics that you’re most curious about. We’ve designed this book
as an ongoing resource for you. Just crack it open to whichever
topic you want to revisit, and think about how your answers to
the questions for reflection might have changed over time.
***
While we’re confident that relationship-­based leadership is
effective, moral, and fulfilling, we’re also confident that it gives
every single person the license to lead. Legend has it that Dwight
Eisenhower defined leadership as the art of getting someone to
do something that you want done because they want to do it. In
this approach, leaders still have clearly defined goals, and they
still need the people around them to work toward those goals.
Introduction: Relationships Under Siege
xxvii
But this leadership style doesn’t appeal to formal authority or
coercion; instead, it depends on the leader’s ability to persuade,
motivate, and create common purpose. Whatever’s on your business card, you can lead if you can inspire people to act.
When leadership is understood as a series of relationships,
no person is excluded from the privilege and responsibility of
leading. You may or may not have a big desk in the corner office
or make policy decisions that affect thousands of lives. You
are, however, surrounded by people with whom you can forge
empowering bonds; you can inspire others with your compassion, talent, and commitment; and you can improve others’ lives
by engaging in their stories, emotions, and beliefs.
That’s all a way of saying something that seems so simple,
but is also rich, challenging, and full of urgent promise: leadership is a relationship.
CHAPTER
1
The Right Amount
of Tension
(Accountability)
2
LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
W
e’ve all been on both the giving and receiving end of
accountability. Chances are you’ve had plenty of experiences when “being held accountable” felt lousy. Maybe it was
a boss who didn’t understand the complexities of your job and
blamed you for things outside of your control; maybe it was a
justified reality check from someone who needed you to know
that you weren’t doing your best. As more and more of our professional and personal lives are assessed by algorithms and star
ratings, accountability can become more punitive than productive. We have to be able to hold each other to standards, and
we have to do so in a way that nourishes our communities, our
people, and our relationships.
In this chapter, we make a case for accountability that’s as
effective as it is compassionate. We talked to an Olympic champion, a coach, and a CEO about practicing accountability in their
relationships. Leaders shouldn’t become micromanaging pests to
create accountable cultures. If they instead focus on understanding the people around them and the situations they face, smart
leaders can use accountability to benefit everyone. If we commit to a shared purpose and expect great things from each other,
we can exercise accountability as an instrument of communal
improvement.
Leadership Is a Choice
Kerri Walsh Jennings is one of the most successful beach volleyball players in history. Over a 20-­year professional career, she’s
won three world championships and four Olympic medals, three
of which are gold. That’s enough to make her the most decorated
The Right Amount of Tension (Accountability)
3
beach volleyball Olympian ever, with a level and longevity of
success that will be difficult for anyone to match. Only two other
Americans—­Misty May-­Treanor and April Ross—­have multiple Olympic medals in beach volleyball, and both of them have
teamed up with Kerri in Olympic play. During Kerri’s 11-­year
partnership with May-­Treanor, the duo won 21 straight matches
in the Olympics, and lost only a single set. It’s virtually impossible to do anything better than Kerri Walsh Jennings has played
beach volleyball.
Kerri’s pairing with May-­Treanor also set a new bar for success in a sport still new to the Olympic lineup. The two entered
the 2004 Athens Olympics, just the third Games to include beach
volleyball, riding a 90-­match win streak. They won the gold relatively easily, becoming the first American team to do so. By the
time they won their third gold medal together in London eight
years later, they’d cemented their legacy not only as seminal
figures in beach volleyball, but also as icons of a new American
sporting dynasty. Kerri and May-­Treanor were untouchable, and
Team USA stood at the vanguard of women’s beach play.
Kerri’s story is not just about accountability; it’s about trust,
stability, and loyalty, too. Accountability sticks out for several
reasons. First and foremost, sustained involvement in elite beach
volleyball requires accountability that few other fields can match.
Athletes have to exercise constant, profound discipline to develop
the skills needed for high-­level collegiate volleyball, and then
make the significantly more challenging Fédération Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB) and Association of Volleyball Professionals (AVP) tours. For those who want to represent their country
in the Olympics, they have to achieve an even higher level, and
4
LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
do so with four-­year intervals between Olympiads. They have
to train and recover without the cushy facilities and functionally
unlimited financial resources of similarly successful athletes in
sports like basketball, football, baseball, and soccer. And, most
distinctly, they have to do so in one-­to-­one partnership. Although
beach volleyball players get coaching, they’re always one of two
on a team. Their teammate is always the same person. Instead of
the complex sociology of a larger group—­in which players are
always getting traded, signing elsewhere, retiring, or just entering the league as rookies—­beach volleyball duos are individual
relationships performing at the highest level together from one
tour stop to the next. They’re world-­class athletic relationships
stressed and tested as much as humanly possible, and each athlete
remains primarily accountable to a single persistent partner.
Given that level of intimacy, accountability isn’t solely a
tool for promoting high performance. It’s also a token of love.
Kerri and May-­Treanor felt this way as they grew up together
on the sand. “There was so much life that was lived along with
volleyball. Volleyball is just the sacred space,” Kerri says. “Having tough conversations is about being a good friend. It’s being
a good partner. Selfishly, if I’m seeing my partner do something
that rubs me the wrong way and that’s hurting our team, I want
to call that out because I want to win. That’s one element to it.
But the deeper element is that I care about this human. And if
there are behaviors or a blind spot that I think she has, it’s my
duty. I love her. I’m willing to put myself out there.”1
For Kerri, training the relationship itself became a crucial
ingredient to success between the lines. Just as they had to get reps
blocking, attacking, digging, and serving, they had to train themselves to engage in uncomfortable conversation if they wanted
The Right Amount of Tension (Accountability)
5
to stay fit and succeed. “You have to find the right amount of
tension. You have to fight, and you have to stay in tune. I realized
with 1440 [the company that Kerri founded with her husband,
Casey Jennings] and with Misty that the more you engage in
those hard, uncomfortable conversations, it does become easier
the next time.” It’s a metaphorical muscle that matters as much
in sports as it does in business. “I really believe it’s a worthwhile
habit to get into. At least you can jump into the deep end of the
pool faster, and then you can get to where you want to go faster.
It brings you closer to yourself. And it may make some miserable
times bearable and worth it. You chose your team for a reason, at
least in theory. You should fight for your team.”
Kerri and May-­Treanor first paired up in their early twenties. Kerri had a few months left of her senior year at Stanford;
May-­Treanor had graduated a year and a half before and started
playing professional beach volleyball, including a trip to the
2000 Olympics in Sydney. (Kerri had represented Team USA in
Sydney on the indoor volleyball team). Even though they were
so young when they formed their team, they’d both already
played at the international level and had learned over years of
high-­level competition to hold themselves accountable at every
step of preparation, from training to nutrition to weightlifting
to persevering in matches. That shared desire to perform led to
a natural accountability. “Misty and I held each other accountable in a subconscious way. Our expressions of ‘I need more, I
need different, I need you to step up’ were all very clear. We
mirrored each other,” Kerri says. “If I wasn’t doing my work
emotionally and mentally, my confidence was shaken. We saw
that in each other. Just seeing that in the other person is really,
really beautiful.”
6
LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
They could hold each other accountable so successfully
because they knew that they shared a total commitment to winning, and they knew each other well enough to pick up on those
subtle signs of letting up. As they won more and more, their subtle accountability became more important. With more pressure
from their opponents, the media, and fans, they had to be able to
hold each other to high standards in a way that was both effective
and removed from the public gaze. When you’re winning titles
hand over fist, Kerri says, “you’ve got a pin on your back, because
everyone wants to kill you. No one has a bad day against you
because you’re the best, and they have nothing to lose. We were
very clear about that, and we relished the challenge.”
Although they enjoyed unprecedented success as a team,
Kerri and May-­Treanor were still young adults trying to find
their places in the world, and were subject to the pressures of
very visible careers that required constant travel, physical stress,
and time away from family and friends. Early on, they agreed to
handle those pressures behind closed doors and within their relationship. “We rarely pointed the finger at each other, but when
we did, we would address it and agree that that’s not cool. That’s
not who we are. We’d squash it right away.” They could insist on
high standards without fighting through the media. “The only
time we ever had fissures between us was when outside people
started to chip away at our bond. That would go on for about two
or three weeks too long. One of us would have to ask, ‘What the
hell is happening? Let’s talk about this,’ and we’d get in a fight. It
only happened maybe three times in those 11 years together, but
each of those coming-­to-­a-­head moments was vital for us. It was
just looking in the mirror and asking, ‘What do we want?’”
The Right Amount of Tension (Accountability)
7
The blowups weren’t just a way to even out whatever new
wrinkles had emerged in their intense partnership. They were a
natural sign that the teammates needed to renegotiate and renew
their commitment to the relationship. “It’s so important in a
relationship, especially when you’ve been together for so long,
to be very clear about what you want, where you’re going, and if
you’re still on the same page.
“It’s so worthwhile to take the risk of having a tough conversation,” Kerri says, and mentions the work she’s done with
the high-­performance psychologist Dr. Michael Gervais. “As I
learned through my counseling with Gervais, there’s deep intimacy when you have conflict. You gain clarity, you gain that
depth of relationship, you gain a new understanding of each
other. That always served Misty and me well, and it’s certainly
helped my relationship with my husband, too.”
Kerri also talks about how discussing grievances refreshes a
relationship. “The moment I start to feel resistance or resentment,
that’s my system telling me that I need to speak to this. It takes
away my spirit when I’m not living truthfully. I can take a lot of
heat. I don’t like it, and I for sure bark back. But I take a lot and I
process it, and then I try to do better.” The practice of accountability resembles the practice of building the physical tools that
she needs to play at a gold-­medal level. “Resistance training is why
I’m so strong and physical and still going after 20 years. Resistance
training also develops my mental capacity and my relationships. It
goes into my emotional capacity as well. I truly believe it’s a mind-­
body-­spirit connection not only for me, but for the team.”
In Kerri’s conception, accountability starts with the individual: Am I doing what I have to do to be truthful and progress
8
LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
toward my goals? A well-­built and tended-­to relationship then
allows that accountability to move outward to a teammate,
spouse, or partner of any kind. Although the day-­to-­day practice
of accountability can be quiet and uneventful, things will always
eventually go wrong. When they do, difficult conversations create deeper intimacy, which in turn allows both people to share
more of themselves and grow together in mutual accountability. We grow deeper and deeper into our responsibility toward
each other as we live the relationship and learn from its weakest moments.
Kerri’s experience with accountability presents a very different picture than the standard way in which “people need to be
held accountable.” We live in a culture that routinely weaponizes
accountability. It’s rarely an explicit instrument of love and care;
it’s a cudgel deployed in service of punishment. We crudely use
some sense of “accountability” as the justification for draconic
criminal sentences, unwarranted firings in the workplace, and
prematurely severed relationships in our social lives. Accountability is too often the euphemized mask of crueler instincts.
It is the socially tenable rebranding of revenge, sadism, and
paternalism.
Kerri offers a more optimistic model of accountability, and
one that we believe is more robust, too. Her relationship with
May-­Treanor is powerful testimony to this constructive definition of accountability, which also allows for a kaleidoscopic variety of leadership styles.
“You don’t have to be an Olympian to be a leader. Just wherever you are, care about it and be authentic. That, to me, is the
most beautiful form of leadership. That’s why the world is so
The Right Amount of Tension (Accountability)
9
inspiring. I’ve seen greatness and I’ve seen leadership at every
age—­it takes on so many different manifestations.” Leadership
is a practice, not a title. It’s the “beautiful form” that Kerri mentions, and one that’s available to everyone at all times—­however
unconventional that might appear.
“Fundamentally, you have to know who you are and what
you want,” Kerri says. “In a team setting, you need to know that
about yourself and you need to know that about your partner.
Then you go onward. You commit, and every day is a choice.
Leadership is a choice.” She saw this time and again in her partnership with May-­Treanor. “Sometimes the way I led was not
right for the setting, and Misty could step up and do her thing.
I was happy to fall in line because it’s not about one above the
other. It’s ‘We’re here to kick ass and do this together, and whatever is going to serve us best is what we’re doing.’ You only have
that if you have a certain amount of confidence and ownership
of who you are.”
Kerri found that deliberate work on her relationship with
May-­Treanor benefited her marriage, and work on her marriage benefited her volleyball partnership, too. “Dr. Gervais
gave me permission to fight with my husband, and I needed it.
My marriage problems helped me with Misty, not only because
she was there for me and we went through something together
and she was a leader and a guide and a shoulder for me, but
because what I learned from my husband in my marriage translated to my sport marriage. I became a better communicator. I
slowed down. I became more specific and honest and thoughtful with my communication: ‘This is what I need. This is what
I’m working for.’”
10
LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
Before their final Olympics together in 2012, Kerri and
May-­Treanor hit one of the worst stretches of their partnership.
They’d fallen from their seat as the reigning hegemons of the
beach, and were no longer seen as the favorite to win the gold
medal. “We had a great 2011,” Kerri says, talking about their
first season back together after May-­Treanor recovered from an
Achilles injury and Kerri gave birth to her second child. “In 2012,
we were a poop show. We were playing not to lose, we’d forgotten who we were, and our swagger was gone.” The results from
the latest chapter of their partnership required another look-­in-­
the-­mirror moment. Once again, Dr. Gervais helped them find
what they really owed to each other. “We were both trying to
be perfect for each other, and you can never win that proposition,” Kerri says. Maybe their sense of accountability had even
gone too far.
Dr. Gervais asked each of them to imagine a 10-­year-­old
version of the other. What would they say to that child?
“You’re good enough,” May-­Treanor said to a young Kerri,
over and over. “You’re good enough.”
When they flipped roles, Kerri told that 10-­year-­old May-­
Treanor: “I’m here.”
“Misty told you to go away,” Dr. Gervais suggested. “What
would you say now?”
“Well, Misty, I’m still here,” Kerri said. “I’m just here for you.”
The exercise forced them to show vulnerability at a time
when they’d fruitlessly insisted on nothing less than perfection. More importantly, though, it reminded them of how close
they’d become during their record-­setting career together. “Just
those two fundamental statements proved that we knew each
The Right Amount of Tension (Accountability)
11
other so well,” Kerri says. “It was a beautiful way to reinforce
that. We trust each other and we know who we are together. We
are unstoppable when we live in that knowing. It’s the emotional
work and the relationship work that made us badass.” Unstoppable indeed: that summer in London, they won their third consecutive Olympic gold.
It should come as no surprise that an athlete who’s competed at the Olympic-­medal level for 20 years, and well past the
age at which nearly all of her peers called it a career, extols the
value of accountability. What’s more novel is how Kerri casts
accountability as a product of an abiding relationship. It isn’t a
management or coaching technique to her. It’s an enactment of
love, and an opportunity to nuance and deepen that love.
One Big Lesson
Accountability based in care inspires us to grow, rather
than just fear negative consequences. Directly confronting problems in a relationship can not only lead to discrete
solutions, but also create deeper intimacy.
These Are Our Expectations
Erica Bamford is the head coach of the Yale women’s lacrosse
team. She’s led the Bulldogs since 2015, following seven years as
an assistant at the University of Florida and a decorated career
as a player.
As a head coach, Erica takes a different approach to accountability than Kerri. Erica’s job depends on her ability to create and
12
LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
nurture relationships, but she’s also the leader responsible for her
team, staff, and the way that the program represents Yale all over
the country.
She uses a teaching framework that her dad taught her
growing up. For any task, someone either:
• Can’t do it: “If you can’t, that’s a circumstance that needs to
be addressed by our coaching staff. As coaches, we’re obligated to fix it. We have to adjust for you,” Erica says.
• Won’t do it: “If you won’t, then you’ve got to fix it or you’ve
got to go. It’s hard to say it like that, but it’s the truth. As a
staff, we cannot commit energy to individuals who aren’t
committed themselves.”
• Is already doing it: “If you’re already doing it, then we want
to celebrate your contribution and ensure that it continues.”
• Doesn’t know how to do it: “If you don’t know how,
it’s our job to teach you by setting clear expectations and
standards.”2
The four-­part framework helps Erica focus her energy as a
leader and use the right kind of accountability for the right situation: “Ultimately, our relationships will determine what category
defines each situation and how to best promote accountability.
The only way to know how to effectively hold players accountable is by first building a strong, genuine relationship.” Creating an accountable culture doesn’t mean expecting the exact
same thing from everyone. Each group needs a different kind of
leadership.
The Right Amount of Tension (Accountability)
13
“With the women we coach, it’s generally that they are
already doing it or they don’t know how. If we haven’t set clear
expectations or standards, we have set them up for failure,” Erica
says. “Whether it’s a student-­athlete, a co-­worker, or even a family member, it’s hard to do something together unless you say,
‘These are our expectations.’” To set her athletes up for success
and set clear expectations, Erica builds up her relationships with
them. Accountability and growth both thrive when they’re suited
to that one particular, complex person. “We like to learn about
their values, what they view as their identity, how they view
the world through the lenses that they have, and who they are
as people.”
Like Kerri, Erica came to that conviction partially through
introspection. “My family is always late for everything. We’ve
always shown up five minutes late to church, for example, and I
never thought it was a big deal. Well, being on time is a standard for other people. So I look at that with our athletes, too. If
they’ve never moved through a practice at full speed, we’ve got
to teach them how to do that. And I often find that when determining accountability, most people just don’t know how to meet
our expectations.”
One player Erica knew well consistently defied team rules,
one after the other. She wasn’t making mistakes on the field—­
she was violating clearly established team guidelines over and
over. “We had several conversations where she admitted to her
mistake and apologized,” Erica says. But she kept finding new
expectations to not meet. Erica reflected on their relationship.
What was she missing? “I looked at the influential people in
14
LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
her life. The models she had didn’t follow rules themselves, and
this player was never really held accountable. That helped me
understand where she was coming from. She wasn’t committed
to meeting team expectations because it hadn’t been a standard
in her life. She didn’t think that they applied to her.”
Psychologically, that wasn’t so far from Erica’s family penchant for tardiness. Maybe failing to meet team expectations
wasn’t about choosing to break the team’s trust and not follow
through after all. Instead, it was an opportunity for Erica to
teach, and the player to learn.
The lesson here isn’t that every mistake, infraction, and
lapse in judgment should be written off as a quirk, and the person who commits it held blameless. Leaders have to impose discipline to keep their organizations functional, let alone thriving.
(The world of big-­time college athletics overflows with stories
of players, coaches, and staffers who commit horrific acts and
skate free because administrators fear that even justified punishment would blemish the reputation of a revenue-­generating
football or basketball team. Many of those cases leave little room
for moral ambiguity.) But Erica’s story shows how sensitive leaders best hold people accountable in a constructive way. The
young woman who didn’t have a model for meeting team expectations wouldn’t have benefited from an over-­the-­top punishment, and the team wouldn’t have, either. Focusing on the origin
of her repeated errors and addressing that root issue turned a
series of disappointments into a lesson for the player, Erica, and
the program.
“We’re teachers first. If someone can’t do something, ‘holding them accountable’ is cruel,” Erica says. “We have a fitness test
The Right Amount of Tension (Accountability)
15
where we have our players run 120 yards in 18 seconds. We don’t
expect all of our goalies to get down in 18 seconds—­running that
distance simply doesn’t apply to their position. Are they going to
run with their teammates? Yes. But are they going to hit 18 seconds like a field player? Likely not.” Once again, where a crude,
hard-­headed leader could easily chew those goalies out, sound
and fury would accomplish nothing other than compromising
Erica’s relationship with them. “Getting on them and trying to
hold them accountable for that is cruel. It is not an expectation
for the goalie position. Instead, we want to ensure that all our
athletes are completing the same task while understanding that
the expectation for results may be different for each position.”
When people witness leaders practicing this kind of calibrated and just accountability, they generally become more
receptive to feedback. Erica has coached a handful of elite
players throughout her career, including an athlete who’d won
numerous accolades and was clearly among the best players in
the country. During one game, though, everything fell apart. “It
was like she had just picked up a stick for the first time,” Erica
says. “I didn’t recognize her on the field.” The staff decided to
substitute her out of the game. It was an unusual step: a team’s
best player typically stays on the field for the entire game
unless they get hurt. “She was pissed when she came out of the
game—­I mean so mad,” Erica says. “I told her on the sideline,
‘We love you. It’s going to be fine. This is just a day. You’re
going to start the next game. This is just a day.’” At the end of
the game, the player walked up to her coach and told her that
she’d been angry with herself. “I appreciate you having faith in
me,” she told Erica.
16
LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
As a coach, Erica still benefits from remembering that teaching moment. In a recent game, she noticed that one of her top
athletes was visibly frustrated on the field after a series of mistakes. “If I hadn’t known her well, I would have looked at her and
thought, ‘Oh, she’s got a bad attitude.’ But I know she doesn’t
have a bad attitude. I know she’s really hard on herself, and she
doesn’t want to let her teammates down.” Erica pulled her out
and told her that even though she was mad at herself, she was
one of the best athletes on the field, and her teammates needed
her to improve her body language. “I don’t care if you drop the
ball, miss every shot you take, get beat every other time down the
field,” Erica told her as she came to the sideline. “Just don’t have
bad body language because it affects your teammates.” Erica put
her right back in the game.
“Does it feel great to the kid we just put in the game and
pulled right back out? No. But as a staff, we’ve got to make these
tough decisions for our team. In this case, the relationship prevailed. I knew who she was, and I knew she wasn’t trying to be a
bad influence. That’s just the way it manifested. She’s upset with
herself.” Once again, because the two of them had built a relationship, Erica could place her in the right bucket and hold her
accountable in the most constructive way. A leader’s demand for
accountability can be both firm and caring, just as we saw with
Kerri Walsh Jennings and Misty May-­Treanor. The intimacy of a
strong relationship gives us a better way to deliver messages that
people don’t want to hear.
The Right Amount of Tension (Accountability)
17
One Big Lesson
Great leaders tailor accountability to the nuances of both
situation and person. Screaming matches are no match for
intelligent, sensitive, and strategic coaching.
A Disciplined Optimist
For Dan Streetman, accountability in relationships means practicing discipline, integrity, and teamwork. Dan is an avid endurance athlete and regularly competes in Ironman events. But he’s
better known as the CEO of TIBCO, a software company that
helps organizations manage and analyze real-­time data. He
leads more than 4,000 employees and a business that earns over
$1 billion in revenue each year. It’s a high-­pressure gig in which
he’s constantly accountable for, and accountable to, a dizzying
array of stakeholders, from those 4,000 employees to partners
around the world. Combine that complexity with the power of
twenty-­first-­century communications technology, and you have
a situation that can lead the unthinking leader astray.
“One of the ongoing challenges for a leader, especially in
technology, is that it’s far easier to share and to ‘broadcast’ than
ever,” Dan says. “It’s overwhelming to determine what you’re
going to reflect on and take the time to bring in. So you find
yourself as a leader broadcasting a lot, and potentially not listening enough.”3 Prominent people, whether they’re titans of
18
LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
industry or celebrity influencers, can record themselves talking
all day long if they want. It just takes three taps on a smartphone
to suddenly appear in the eyes and ears of hundreds, thousands,
or even millions of people. “Now fortunately, if you flip the paradigm, you can also listen even more than ever before. With our
enhanced digital capabilities, we have many opportunities to take
in data—­to listen more—­but you have to be disciplined about
doing that.” Dan thinks about this not just as a leader, but as a
self-­proclaimed “eternal optimist for technology.” Tech tempts
us, but it’s also opened up entirely new ways to build relationships. “I’m passionate about technology, and what’s most exciting
to see is that if we have that discipline and that reminder, we can
connect in ways that would otherwise be very difficult. Our ability to connect with others is now greater than ever, as long as you
are disciplined about taking the time to actually connect.”
Dan began his career in the military. After nine years on
active duty, he was fascinated by the promise of the technology
industry and the exploding Silicon Valley scene in the late 1990s.
“The web was on fire, so I thought that that was potentially far
more interesting than anything we were doing in the military at
that point in time. The Army was downsizing after the end of the
Cold War, and I naively believed we were entering an era of prolonged peace,” he says. “I thought, ‘You know, maybe I should go
explore technology.’ It was really about the intellectual challenge
and where I felt I could contribute the most to society.”
Things changed very shortly after he arrived in California, fresh off the MBA that he earned after leaving the Army.
“The dot-­com bubble burst just as I graduated B-­school in 2000,
which was a very difficult time for many people. And of course
The Right Amount of Tension (Accountability)
19
9/11 happened, which was even scarier. I committed to learn all I
could about software while also remaining in the Army Reserve.”
Dan matured as a tech leader during a stampeding recovery
for the software industry, and he enjoyed a fast climb toward the
corner office. But early on, he couldn’t help but second-­guess
his decision to leave active duty now that his chosen industry
had collapsed and the importance of the US military abroad had
skyrocketed. “Still, you always have to be thinking about what
you’re going to do going forward. Relationships help you get
through all of those moments. All my career planning has been
done in the rearview mirror, and anything important really happened solely because of relationships. To say that I left business
school right in 2000 and thought, ‘Here’s how my career plan—­’
No. I did the best job I could in the roles that I had,” Dan says.
“I tried to do everything with as much integrity and as much
teamwork as I could. And then every role after that just built
from there. That’s the best advice anybody can give about career
planning: first and foremost, do the best you can in the role you
have. All else follows.”
Dan’s emphasis on listening as a way to build relationships
has also influenced the way that he communicates online. For
a CEO who can’t have face-­to-­face contact with everyone he’s
accountable to each day, his online presence is a big part of what
people think of him as a leader. “You want to contribute to the
common good, but realize that it’s not really all about you sharing
you. We all got excited about social media early on, and in those
first days I absolutely tended to overshare. But what I realized was
that I don’t need to be posting something every day to be part of
the conversation.” In the spirit of thoughtfully listening instead
20
LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
of heedlessly soliloquizing, he started using social media as the
seed of person-­to-­person relationship development. “While it
feels way more efficient for me to post something that can be
broadcast, oftentimes I’ll see something interesting and instead
send that person an individual note or call them. That’s when
you get that next level of conversation that helps you build a relationship and learn something that you might not have learned, or
they might not have shared, on somebody’s public thread.”
Continuing to devote time, energy, and—­in the case of personal messages—­discretion to his relationships has made Dan’s
career a personal affair. By staying accountable to his own standards and the people he’s worked with, he’s moved from one job
to another through direct experience with people. “I have not
taken a role in any new company where I hadn’t worked with
someone involved before. It all comes back to building strong
relationships with people, but doing it based on the fact that they
know you’re going to have high integrity, and they know you’re
working toward a greater good.” Showcasing accountability and
integrity to create those relationships as one’s career progresses
has never been more important. The modern economy enables
and requires far more job changes than previous generations
could have imagined, and earning your reputation with co­­
workers makes relationships endure. That in turn opens up new
opportunities. “Many work experts call this a contract economy,
that we all commit to making contracts for three to five years at
a time,” Dan says. “That’s essentially the average of each role I’ve
held, but every one of them came via someone I knew well, who
was involved in something else, saying to me, ‘This is interesting
and I’d like you to take a look at it.’”
The Right Amount of Tension (Accountability)
21
Again, we’re not saying that everything will be sunshine and
rainbows, just as Dan’s career arc looks cleaner in retrospect than
it did in real time. He’s careful to accentuate that relationships
depend on rock-­solid accountability, especially in the workplace.
“We don’t want people to go away thinking it’s all about the relationship and not about the work content. You’ve built those
relationships, but you’ve also delivered on every commitment
you’ve ever made,” he says. “The relationship piece is important,
but what you do within the context of the relationship is also
critical. You could get to thinking that it’s just all about building
a good Rolodex of people that you really like hanging out with.
That’s not it, either.” Some of the people Dan enjoys working
with most are completely different from him. “We all learn more
from heterogeneous teams than from homogeneous ones, but
when we all work together, we can make very cool things happen.”
One Big Lesson
Mature accountability isn’t just about doing things to
other people. An important part of becoming an accountable leader is practicing the self-­discipline to listen to
others—­rather than broadcasting to them—­and shape
your own behaviors in a way that earns their respect and
recommendation.
The Delicate Dance
In this chapter, we’ve highlighted people who’ve used accountability to become better leaders. Each did so from a different role:
22
LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
Kerri Walsh Jennings as a partner, Erica Bamford as a coach, and
Dan Streetman as a chief executive. All of them discuss accountability not as the sibling of fire and brimstone, but as a nuanced
element that accompanies our relationships. Great leadership
doesn’t let failure go unnoticed and leave chronic problems
to fester. There will always be times when leaders must choose to
reprimand or even remove people from their communities. But
fixating on only that element of accountability is foolish, particularly given how overemphasized it already is in our culture.
Brilliant leaders find contextually relevant and productive ways
to inject accountability into their environments. They know that
accountability works better when it happens within the context
of a strong relationship. Perhaps most importantly, they also
start by holding themselves to the highest standards, and practicing the discipline and integrity to never let themselves off easy.
Takeaways
• Accountability isn’t just a top-­down system of assessment
and punishment. It’s a daily practice of reliability, trustworthiness, and achievably high standards. When we
share a strong relationship with someone, they can hold
us accountable more effectively than someone who we
don’t know and trust.
• Exhibiting accountability over time is a gateway to trust.
When we see someone acting with accountability, we
The Right Amount of Tension (Accountability)
gain the evidence we need to trust them. (More on this
in Chapter 4.)
• Introspection is one of our best tools for increasing
accountability. By better understanding ourselves and
those around us, we can better diagnose problems, have
more specific conversations about fixing them, and
improve our shared situations.
Questions for Reflection
• Which conversations could you initiate in your life to
address festering problems and create deeper intimacy?
• Think of a time in which you were “held accountable”
unfairly. What might the other person have learned
about you to better address the situation? How might
that experience inflect the way that you hold other
people to your standards?
• Think of someone in your life who’s failing to meet
your expectations. Have you made those expectations unequivocally clear to that person? If you have,
are you insisting on actions that the other person isn’t
capable of?
23
CHAPTER
2
Forgiveness Every Day
(Forgiveness)
26
T
LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
he language of leadership often focuses on building, whether
that’s hiring new people, teaching kids how to develop strong
habits, or getting more patrons to eat at your restaurant. In all
kinds of pursuits, we talk a lot about creation, production, development, and more.
This chapter is different. It’s about preparing for what happens when things go wrong—­sometimes very, very wrong. There
are plenty of processes for assessing and dismissing employees;
for extracting “low performers” from organizations and hiring
exciting replacements; for cutting “bad influences” out of our
lives. There’s no organizational process for looking another
human being in the face and saying, “I messed this up. I’m sorry,
and this is what I’m going to do differently from now on.” There’s
no best practice for responding with, “I hear you, and I want to
move forward together.”
This is the hard, uncomfortable work of leading through
relationships. Accountability doesn’t prevent failure. Every relationship will stall, sputter, and have dark days. Many include the
pain of disappointment and betrayal. Those are the moments
when it’s easiest to doubt the importance of relationships and of
specific people in our lives. When people let us down, it’s easy
to wonder if things would go more smoothly alone. But it’s also
the time when great leaders choose to sit with discomfort and
meet it with humble love. We don’t mean the forgiveness that
comes when someone arrives at an appointment 20 minutes late
or doesn’t do their part of a group project. Those are meaningful
but small acts of forgiveness. Instead, we mean the decision
Forgiveness Every Day (Forgiveness)
27
to acknowledge each other’s failings with unflinching clarity,
recommit to each other’s lives, and walk together through both
darkness and light.
Stand Behind Them
Dr. Virginia Hill has devoted her life to educating children in
Pittsburgh. She’s an accomplished, energetic principal who runs
toward daunting challenges. She talks a lot about values that
you don’t hear often in conventional leadership training: as an
administrator, she cares most about creating a “loving, motherly,
caring environment” at her school.1
When she stepped in to run Lincoln Elementary School, she
saw a community that needed a complete culture shift. The kids
were “angry and bitter,” she says, and understandably so. “With
inner-­city poverty, our kids grow up so fast. They have to address
so many adult issues. They don’t have that space to be a child.” Students at Lincoln ranged from preschool to fifth grade. Nearly all
of the children came from low-­income households, and many of
them lacked access to enough food and a safe home environment.
Lincoln desperately needed to improve its academic performance, but that wasn’t Virginia’s primary goal. To her, being an
educator meant nurturing her students and treating them like
young people, not just test-­takers. If the kids knew that they’d
step into a warm, loving, and forgiving environment each morning, the metrics that district and state administrators used to
measure the school would fall into place. “We needed to focus
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
more on the entire child and how she or he grew holistically,”
Virginia says. “We needed to build the wills of the students.”
Senior administrators in the district wanted Virginia to be
more aggressive with her teachers, confront them, and create an
intense environment of so-­called “accountability.” That didn’t
make any sense to her:
To create that environment, you’re jeopardizing the relationship
that teachers are going to have with those children. You put them
in a different frame of mind when you come down on teachers
like that. It puts them in a place of fear, and puts them in a place
of always looking over your shoulder. So they forget the most
important reason that they’re there is not looking out for their
retirement, or their check, or how they’re going to lose their job.
The most important part and reason that we’re there is for the
children. So I tried to be very, very methodical on how I addressed
behaviors when they came up in the school.
She decided to bake forgiveness into her leadership. With
her team of teachers and staff, she emphasized ownership rather
than buy-­in: everyone would own their work, their projects, their
classes, and their interactions with students. She wanted to give
her team the freedom to do what had to be done, and to focus on
opportunities that other people might miss. It was riskier than dictating instructions and insisting on obedience—­people wouldn’t
always succeed, and Virginia knew it. They might try audacious
projects that flopped, or they might not be ambitious enough.
She told her staff that “if you can give me 100 percent of
what you have, we’ll work with that.” She knew that people would
make mistakes, and she chose to “let people make mistakes, and
Forgiveness Every Day (Forgiveness)
29
stand behind them when they do.” She made sure that she was
personally doing everything that she asked other people to do,
from wiping down tables in the cafeteria to driving kids home
from school when they didn’t have any other ride. “Anything I’m
going to ask [teachers] to do, I’m gonna do it too.” She stood
beside her people when they cleaned up their failures, sometimes
literally. “That trust that I’m not going to kill you when you do
something wrong or mess up or make a decision—­that allows
them the opportunity to make decisions and really lead, because
no one wants to be micromanaged.”
At Lincoln, understanding the value of forgiveness wasn’t
just a management strategy. Forgiveness among the school’s
adults was another way that Virginia modeled the behaviors that
she wanted to develop among Lincoln’s students. If the adults
saw each other’s successes and failures and grew together when
things didn’t go well, then the students would too. Virginia
couldn’t help kids develop as holistic human beings without letting them observe forgiveness in action, especially when so many
of them brought their trauma to school. Every day on the intercom, she told students that even if no one else told them that
they were loved, she loved them, and she always would. It was,
in the truest sense of love, not conditional on academic excellence or good behavior or meeting some criteria that adults had
decided upon. She loved them with both actions and words.
Her love and culture of forgiveness also showed up in the
initiatives that she pioneered at Lincoln. She and her team started
big, brave programs that Lincoln had never tried before. Virginia
grew up in a challenging home herself. “Not having gas, not having lights, sometimes not a telephone, not having food . . . school
30
LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
was important. School was a place that I was able to go and
forget about what was happening at home.” She had first-­hand
experience with some of what her students lived each day. She
created new mental health services to give kids reliable, clinical help. She brought in the Positivity Project (co-­founded by
­co-­author Mike), which helps kids develop strong relationships
by recognizing character strengths in both peers and themselves.
“That really melted the hearts of the children and allowed them
to be children,” she says. The program gave the kids ways to create more joyful memories on good days and work through the
bad ones, too.
Under Virginia’s leadership, Lincoln began to offer more
support for moments of weakness, disappointment, and vulnerability. Virginia partnered with community organizations to
start a school store inside Lincoln, which not only helped the
elementary-­school kids learn about the basics of shopping in a
store and managing money, but also gave them easy access to
school uniforms, new shoes, and presents for their loved ones.
Lincoln has a washer and dryer and sets of extra clothes for children who come to school in a dirty set. If the school was going
to teach effectively, it would have to back these kids up with the
infrastructure to help them succeed when they, or someone else
in their life, stumbled. Sometimes that just meant giving students
easy access to a clean shirt.
For all of the intangible ways in which Lincoln improved
under Virginia’s leadership, it also made enormous quantitative gains. Do a quick search for Virginia online and you’ll
quickly find press coverage of how dramatically Lincoln’s students improved their results on standardized tests. During
Forgiveness Every Day (Forgiveness)
31
the 2012–2013 school year, just under 29 percent of Lincoln’s
fourth-­graders were “proficient and advanced” in math. The
very next school year, almost 55 percent were—­that’s an 89 percent
increase in a year. For that, the district recognized Lincoln as
one of its most-­improved schools.2
Virginia emphasizes that she wasn’t interested in “teaching to the test,” a practice in which educators prioritize teaching
strategies to improve standardized test results rather than the
general education that kids need to develop and succeed in life.
By all accounts, Virginia’s account is true. Lincoln’s performance
skyrocketed, but only as a beneficiary of the students’ new sense
of stability, care, and holistic development. As Virginia believed
from the beginning, the test results really did fall into place. But
she’s more proud of a different statistic: in her first year at Lincoln, the administration handed down over 200 suspensions. The
year that Virginia left, there were nine.
The new approach came with its fair share of detractors. For
a struggling school facing intense political pressure to improve
its test scores, a leader who chose to prioritize love, empathy,
and forgiveness wasn’t an obvious panacea. Virginia’s approach
seemed like folly to the administrators who were single-­mindedly
obsessed with quantitative improvement. Even as the increasingly promising scores rolled in, she continued to face criticism
for her style. That’s when she realized that her forgiveness hadn’t
been quite wide enough. She thought about forgiveness with
her students and teachers all the time, but she hadn’t considered
what to do about people who fundamentally disagreed with her
approach. “What about when educators don’t believe in love?” she
asked herself.
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
Her forgiveness simply had to expand. It couldn’t just be
about accepting failure and disappointment; it had to include sitting with deep conflict and forgiving even those educators who
refused to participate in Lincoln’s message of love. Virginia didn’t
have to agree with them or even understand why career educators opposed such a benevolent message. To continue leading the
school, she had to forgive both her allies and her opponents each
and every day.
Virginia’s experience exemplifies what can happen when
leaders consider forgiveness not just a one-­off act, but a core
practice. In everyday life, we tend to invoke forgiveness as either
a very serious or a very trivial thing: we forgive the stranger at
the bakery for accidentally spilling a bit of coffee on our shoes,
or we summon the moral strength to forgive an abusive parent.
There’s nothing wrong with either of those, but Virginia encourages us to infuse forgiveness into all parts of our life. It’s not just a
discrete act. It’s an ongoing philosophy, and it allows us to better
manage challenging environments. When we say upfront that
we’ll stand behind our people when they make mistakes, we’re
not just pricing in the inefficiencies of failure. We’re committing
to a relationship through peaks and valleys, triumphs and betrayals. In this reframing of forgiveness, it’s always there. We’re not
waiting for a collapse to pull out our “I forgive you” cards; we’re
living and leading with forgiveness.
Practicing forgiveness aligns it with many other leadership
values. We take for granted that things like trust, accountability, and resilience are ongoing behaviors. You might do something that requires a lot of trust—­like asking a friend to watch
Forgiveness Every Day (Forgiveness)
33
your children for a week when you’re suddenly summoned out
of town—­or builds a lot of trust—­like, well, successfully watching your friend’s kids for a week. But these acts merely highlight
the constant flow of trust in a relationship. Trust is a conviction, a feeling: it’s moving between people all the time. We ought
to think of forgiveness in exactly the same way. We shouldn’t
just save it for patching up relationship failures. If we commit to
forgiveness as an ever-­present element of our relationships, we
can find a rich new way of supporting people throughout their
lives . . . and, as Virginia did, enjoy the tangible results too.
One Big Lesson
Don’t save forgiveness for one-­off times when things go
poorly. When we live our lives with a constant spirit of
forgiveness, we empower ourselves and those around us to
take bigger risks and act with greater conviction.
Grace and Fire
Even if we choose to practice forgiveness, there are still plenty
of times when we have to forgive discrete acts of immorality,
neglect, inability, and deceit. That often means sitting with
uncomfortable, face-­to-­face conversations and doing the work
to grow together in relationships that would otherwise fall apart.
The transgressions we choose to forgive will often be trivial—­an
errand forgotten, a mean comment uttered—­but every once in
a while, they’ll walk the thin boundary between life and death.
34
LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
Lieutenant General J. T. Thomson served in the United
States Army for nearly 40 years, beginning as a West Point cadet.
In his final military role before retirement, he served as commander of the NATO Allied Land Command in Turkey, overseeing land forces for the 30 member nations’ operations in Europe.
Throughout his Army tenure, he took on increasing responsibility in assignments around the Middle East, Europe, and at home
in the United States.
Nearly 30 years after he received his officer commission as
a second lieutenant, the Army sent him back to West Point, this
time to serve the academy as the commandant of cadets. The
commandant is the ranking officer in charge of the academy’s
students (referred to as “cadets”) and works with the different
departments on campus to ensure that graduating cadets are prepared to lead Army units in active duty.3 Soon after J.T. took
the job, a decorated retired general told him that the commandant addresses all of the seniors before their capstone leadership
course. He’d need to tell them what being a professional soldier
was all about. “Don’t get up there and tell them this career is
important,” the general told him. “These are college students.
They need a story they can relate to. It’d be better if it were
something from when you were a lieutenant.”4
The story J.T. decided to share soon acquired a kind of
mythical status at West Point. Instead of talking about a moment
of great victory or a particularly exciting deployment, he told
the cadets about a leader who’d forgiven him decades ago, in a
training facility in rural southeast Germany. “Somebody forgave
me and I’ve always remembered that, because I was forgiven for
a massive error.”
Forgiveness Every Day (Forgiveness)
35
One afternoon at that base in Germany, J.T. and thousands
of other soldiers gathered for training exercises, supervised by a
two-­star general. Perched on a hill beside the exercises, the general had invited a group of commanders and NATO partners as
guests. They were in for a show: the soldiers would shoot enormous artillery in coordinated blasts, the guns erupting in near-­
unison and their enormous projectiles landing at a designated
spot with stunning precision.
J.T. was fresh out of West Point, in his early twenties, and
responsible for leading a platoon with many soldiers who were
both older and more experienced than he was. Just before firing
the first artillery round, J.T. received an order to move the platoon to a new position. They frantically packed up their equipment and hustled to the new spot, only to find that another
platoon had already claimed it.
The countdown to the first round kept ticking. J.T. got on
his radio, reported that their spot was already taken, and received
yet another new location for his platoon. Once again, they moved
to the new position and finished their firing preparations in three
minutes—­an unheard-­of time, even for emergency firing procedures. The platoon was working together beautifully. All four of
their guns successfully shot their hundred-­pound projectiles on
time, and the ground shook as the other 68 booming howitzers
joined. The platoon had succeeded, even with two seat-­of-­the-­
pants changes. J.T. sat in his brand-­new Humvee and listened to
the radio, waiting for an update and gazing proudly at his team.
“Whooooooaaaaaaa! We got a lone gun!” the radio blared.
Seventy-­one of the 72 rounds had landed in the middle of
the target area. The other round flew two kilometers off and
36
LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
landed at the base of the hill where the general and his guests had
stood to observe. All 72 of the rounds were highly explosive. The
one that flew wildly off-­target blasted into a group of 40-­foot
pine trees, split them open, and lit them on fire. Everyone was
safe, but someone had made a complete fool of himself almost
directly under the nose of the general. “I laughed,” J.T. says. “I
was like, oohhhh, somebody’s gonna get in trouble here.”
The soldiers reloaded all of the guns and fired again.
Once again came that yell from the radio: “Hey, we got a
lone gun!”
As the platoon leader, J.T. “safed” the guns: each time they
prepared to fire, the platoon’s gunnery sergeant laid all four guns
and pointed them toward the target, and J.T. checked that they
were aimed correctly before giving approval to launch. J.T. was
sure that his platoon had shot perfectly, but he got up to double-­
check. Better safe than sorry.
Working right to left, he checked the compass on each gun.
The first one looked good. So did the second, and the third. Then
he got to the fourth gun. It was 200 mil-­radians (about 11 radial
degrees) off its intended direction. That discrepancy multiplied
by the 10,000 meters that the projectile had to travel meant that
it’d miss the target by about two kilometers.
They’d shot the lone gun.
“I thought I was done,” J.T. says. He immediately called a
ceasefire and found his gunnery sergeant.
The gunnery sergeant was an expert at orienting the platoon’s
guns, but everyone had been in a hurry during those two abrupt
moves. The gunnery sergeant had gotten excited. Everybody had.
The aiming circle has two dials for orienting the gun tubes: one
Forgiveness Every Day (Forgiveness)
37
macro dial, and one micro dial. When he safed the guns, J.T. only
checked the micro dial, because the guns were never more than
four or five millimeters off. That small of an error wouldn’t show
up in the macro dial, which, by the time J.T. conducted his check,
always showed that the gun was on-­target. But that day, the gun
was exactly 200 millimeters off. The micro dial showed that everything was oriented perfectly. The macro dial told the entire
story, but no one had checked it. The gunnery sergeant had coincidentally misaimed the gun by exactly an amount that wouldn’t
get caught during the double-­check—­and an amount so substantial that it nearly hit the visiting dignitaries.
The platoon fixed the gun and finished the exercise, and
J.T. went back to the command post. He stood with two other
members of his platoon and another young officer. “I fessed up
to them,” J.T. says. “I said, ‘Hey, we messed it up. We got the
gun relaid and we’ve probably got to report this. That’s what the
Standard Operating Procedure says: you’ve got to report it.’”
The second lieutenant told him not to report it—­no one
had been hurt, and the exercise should continue. The gunnery
sergeant from J.T.’s platoon agreed: no one was hurt, the error
was fixed, and if anything was going to happen, it would be J.T.
losing his job. He’d been responsible for safing the guns, and
he’d done a shoddy job. The private in the Humvee said the same
thing, but added that it was a decision that J.T. had to make as the
platoon leader. Everyone agreed that outside of the platoon, no
one would have known about the error, and no one would hold
J.T. personally accountable.
Within the platoon, though, everyone knew what had
happened.
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
The platoon leader, Sergeant First Class Joe Sandel, adamantly disagreed with the others: “Sir, you made a bad mistake.
We gotta report this. That’s just the SOP [Standard Operating
Procedure]. Yeah, nobody got hurt, but we gotta fess up.”
J.T. decided that Sandel was right. He got on the radio and
reported the error, figuring it might just go up the chain of command, fall under the responsibility of a more senior officer, and
be done. That’s what he was hoping for, anyway.
“Roger, keep shooting,” J.T.’s boss said. “Stand by for further instructions.”
For two hours, the radio stayed silent. Apparently this
wouldn’t just blow over. Why else would the instructions be taking so long?
All of a sudden, a convoy of three Humvees pulled up to the
platoon. The brigade commander, the battalion commander, and
the battery commander from the radio stepped out. None wore
a smile, or anything like one.
The brigade commander approached. He was a senior
officer who’d already succeeded for decades to reach this point
in the Army chain of command. He led thousands of soldiers and
had his own support staff. He wasn’t the kind of person a second
lieutenant would want to anger. “What happened?” he asked.
J.T. explained as quickly as he could. The safing, the 200 mils,
the hustling between spots . . . the whole story. “It’s my fault,”
J.T. said. “I didn’t safe the guns.” He showed them the dials on
the guns, and how they’d aligned perfectly to create the horribly
inaccurate blasts.
The commander stood silently. I’m about to get relieved,
J.T. thought to himself. There goes that.
Forgiveness Every Day (Forgiveness)
39
Finally, the commander spoke. “Why did you report this?”
“Sir, I don’t think I could have lived with myself,” J.T. told
him. “We’re supposed to report it.”
“But you would’ve never gotten caught.”
“We thought about that. But I don’t think I could live with it.”
Again the commander stood in silence. Again J.T. thought
that he was seconds away from getting fired, with his platoon
watching from 100 meters away.
“Hold out your hand,” the commander said.
J.T. squinted. “Excuse me?”
“Hold out your hand,” the commander repeated.
J.T. reached out his hand, palm up.
“Turn your hand over,” the commander said.
J.T. twisted his palm to face the dirt. The commander
reached out and gently slapped him square on the wrist. “Don’t
ever let that happen again, and make sure you do a good after-­
action review.” Then he walked away. All three officers got back
into their Humvees and drove off. That was the last J.T. ever
heard about the artillery mistake, until he told the story to that
group of West Point cadets.
J.T.’s story is about human fallibility, even in a job as intense
and dangerous as warfare. It’s also a lesson that the power to punish coexists with the power to absolve. There are plenty of cases
in which severe punishment is the best course of action, especially when people’s lives are at risk. But West Point had taught
the cadets plenty about the danger of war and the seriousness
with which they had to do their jobs. They needed a story about
forgiveness.
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
The same error in different circumstances could have led
to much worse results. Everyone there was lucky that the aiming
mistake happened during a training exercise and that the projectiles had only hit trees. But part of the role of an empathetic,
relationship-­based leader is recognizing exactly the context in
which the error happened. As J.T. reflected on that story now
that he’s led large groups of soldiers in life-­or-­death scenarios,
he called out the importance of appropriate punishment and
appropriate forgiveness. “Sometimes you give someone a letter of reprimand. It doesn’t end a career. They don’t like it and
you’ve got to counsel them, but sometimes you give them a slap
on the wrist. Sometimes the error’s too egregious, and you have
to take more drastic measures. But this goes back . . . it’s all about
relationships.”
The cadets who heard that story have now finished their
time as second lieutenants, and are older than J.T. was in Germany. He still gets messages from them about the artillery mistake, along with new stories about how that lesson has shaped
their own leadership.
One Big Lesson
Sometimes the greatest exercise of power is the choice to
forgive rather than punish.
To Promote Mercy
At first blush, the lessons from J.T. Thomson and Dr. Virginia Hill
don’t bear much resemblance to each other—­from their timelines
to the environments in which they took place, they illustrate two
Forgiveness Every Day (Forgiveness)
41
different faces of forgiveness. But both leaders made a conscious
effort to share the story of forgiveness with their people. Each
and every day, Virginia reminded students of her unconditional
affection and care for them; J.T. used a moment of teaching to
prioritize the importance of mistake and mercy. Both of them
made a point to tell us about forgiveness as an indispensable part
of their leadership, and both made unequivocally clear to their
people that forgiveness would be an important part of how they
led. It’s that extra step—­the choice to say again and again how
important forgiveness is—­that turns forgiveness from a laudable
personal act into a powerful social force.
Takeaways
• Forgiveness isn’t just something we do when we’ve been
wronged. It’s much more powerful when we infuse it into
our relationships and plans, however well they’re going.
• A culture of forgiveness often yields a culture of bravery.
When people know that they’re loved, cared for, and
supported even when they fail, they’re free to try audacious, creative, and risky things.
• Forgiveness is one of the most effective ways to lead by
example. When forgiveness spreads from person to person, it creates a culture where people can acknowledge
and learn from failure, rather than hide it out of fear of
punishment or exclusion.
• Owning up to your mistakes often increases the chance
that you’ll be forgiven rather than punished.
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
Questions for Reflection
• Think of one relationship you have that’s burdened by
consistent tension, conflict, or resentment. How might
a spirit of forgiveness help relieve that burden? What
concrete habits might you try to create that spirit of
forgiveness?
• Pick one part of your work that hasn’t been going well.
How might you incorporate forgiveness into that work?
How might results improve if you and the people you
work with knew that failure wasn’t catastrophic for your
relationships?
• How might exhibiting forgiveness inspire the people
around you? How might your example contribute to a
culture of forgiveness in your workplace, team, family, or
friend group?
CHAPTER
3
Jump Back Together
(Resilience)
44
LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
E
very story of resilience begins in darkness. Without grief,
strife, and frustration, there could be no resilience—­it is
our response to suffering. As Dr. Maria Konnikova writes in her
overview of the psychology of resilience:
Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. Whether you
can be said to have it or not largely depends not on any particular
psychological test but on the way your life unfolds. If you are
lucky enough to never ­experience any sort of adversity, we won’t
know how resilient you are. It’s only when you’re faced with
obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience,
or the lack of it, emerges: Do you succumb or do you surmount?1
If you’ve just secured a long-­awaited promotion at work,
scheduled a first date with a crush, bought your dream house
right on the beach, and won the lottery, it’s hard to display resilience, however motivated you might be. When times are good,
making yourself resilient—­or creating a culture of resilience—­
means preparing for when things will go wrong.
Even though resilience implies the eventual arrival of hard
times, it’s nonetheless enjoyed a new period of fashionability,
along with similar ideas like “grit” and “perseverance.” The literary critic Parul Sehgal notes how resilience has become “an
obsession among middle-­
class parents who want to prepare
their children to withstand a world that won’t always go their
way.”2 It’s never appeared more in the written record: ­mentions
of “resilience” in books published in English more than quadrupled between 2000 and 2019, and that was after doubling
between 1990 and 2000.3 Unsurprisingly, it’s also used in more
and more ways. “Resilience” now appears as a quick way to refer
Jump Back Together (Resilience)
45
to volatility, fluctuations, and equilibria, but also work ethic,
durability, relentlessness, and any number of other things. In this
Resilience Renaissance, the word itself has come to mean both
everything and nothing. For this chapter to make any sense, we
need to refine our definition.
In English, we get the word “resilient” from Latin words
that mean to “jump back”—­to be resilient is to “re-­jump.”4 (Stick
with us here. We promise this isn’t an English lesson.) From the
very origin of the word, ground into our sense of resilience is
not just a generic idea of recovering or licking our wounds to
survive another day, but also a sense that resilience is physical,
active, and even joyful. Konnikova posed the question of whether
we ­succumb or surmount in difficult situations. In our jumping
understanding of resilience, we may well surmount obstacles, but
we don’t do so by dutifully trudging to the mountain top. We
confront them by bending our knees, loading up all of our energy,
and springing upward as high as we can. We thrust ourselves into
the air, maybe even to heights we haven’t achieved before.
A culture of resilience isn’t simply the resilience of each
member of the group summed up, and it’s not about screening
each new member to make sure that they’re as hardy as possible.
A resilient culture means grabbing hands and leaping together,
knowing that the leaping will go better because you’re not alone.
Everyone is encouraged to leap, and it’s hard to stay pinned to the
ground as neighbors pull your hands skyward. When we’re resilient, we jump back into our lives, into situations where we may
fail again, into more potential pain. We might be jumping to a
beautiful and satisfying new era of our lives, or down into an even
deeper, darker well. We jump regardless, and we jump together.
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
It’s fitting, then, that one of our favorite stories of resilience
comes from someone who’s dedicated his career to teaching
teams of very skilled, very prominent jumpers.
Sudden Change
John Beilein is one of the most renowned and successful coaches
in college basketball. In more than 45 years of coaching, he’s
worked at nearly every level of the sport, from high school near
his hometown in western New York to the NBA. He’s almost
certainly had more success up and down the ladder of college
basketball than any other coach in history, with at least one 20-­
win season in each of four different levels of college basketball,
from junior college to the University of Michigan.5 He’s also led
multiple teams to national championship games and helped turn
unheralded teenagers into NBA starters. He now serves as a senior advisor for player development with the Detroit Pistons.
You might expect a coach to fixate on themes like ambition,
obsessive work ethic, and strategy. When we spoke to John, we
heard a very different approach. Time and again, he highlighted
the role of resilience in not only his own life, but also in his role
as a teacher and mentor to young people.
In early March 2017, John’s team at the University of Michigan sat squarely inside “the bubble” for the NCAA tournament.
They’d have to do well in a tournament of schools from their
conference (the Big Ten) to have a chance at competing for the
national championship. The NCAA tournament—­affectionately
known as March Madness, the Big Dance, and even just The
Dance—­selects a wide swath of teams from across the country,
Jump Back Together (Resilience)
47
pits them against each other, and whittles the field down one by
one until the final remaining school earns the title of National
Champion. It’s routinely one of the most-­
watched sporting
events in America and the most prominent, mythical stage for
every college basketball player.
Michigan’s hopes hung by a thread, and they desperately wanted
in. Out of the Big Ten’s 14 teams, the Wolverines sat in a four-­way
tie for fifth place. They’d put up a respectable year, but one that fell
far short of the feats that Michigan teams just a few years earlier
had achieved. Now they’d have to beat at least one top team in the
conference tournament to prove they deserved a spot in The Dance.
On the morning of March 7, the team woke up to punishing
winds in Ann Arbor. Practice was canceled—­the violent storm, a
late gasp of retreating winter, had knocked out electricity in the
Crisler Center, their arena on campus. They headed to Willow
Run Airport for their charter flight that afternoon. They’d fly
straight to the nation’s capital and play Illinois in the first round
of the Big Ten tournament at noon the next day.
Conditions were no better at the airport. “The team, the
cheerleaders, the band . . . everybody was nervous, because you
could hardly walk to the plane. It was so windy. It was blowing
you around,” John says. “I knew that conditions were really bad.
I mentioned that to the pilots, and they said, ‘Oh, no problem.
Don’t worry about it. We’ll be fine.’”6
The whole traveling party anxiously boarded the plane. It
began to accelerate down the runway.
Shortly after reaching full speed, the pilot slammed the brakes
and aborted takeoff. As soon as the brakes hit, flight attendants started
barking instructions. Protocols blared from the overhead speakers:
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
GET DOWN. STAY DOWN. GET DOWN.
STAY DOWN.
The passengers covered themselves and braced for impact.
The plane finally came to a stop—­though they didn’t know it
at the time, they had nearly fallen into a ravine. The plane had
run clear off the runway and careened 400 yards through mud at
the end of the runway. The crew sprang into action, opened the
emergency exit doors, and began inflating the emergency slides
that every airplane passenger hopes never to see.
“I swear we’d never lose a game if we executed the game plan
in basketball like we did getting off that plane,” John says. “I mean,
we were off that plane. The slides opened up and the guys threw
the emergency windows out. They helped the band and cheerleaders jump out onto the wing. I’m at the bottom of the slide assisting
people to slide down and depart. But when we got about 50 yards
clear from the crash and saw that we all made it, a few of the players
started saying to me, ‘Coach: Sudden change, man. Sudden change.’”
“Sudden change” had been one of John’s favorite coaching
axioms. He drilled it into his players’ minds in practices, film sessions, team meetings, and games. It applied in the free-­flowing
40 minutes of basketball that determined each win and loss,
and it applied in the chaos of a malfunctioning airplane. John
preached the importance of adapting instantly to unforeseen
­circumstances and creating teams resilient enough to use trauma
as a seed for growth. “I’m a bounce-­back guy,” he says.
John grew up in a family that understood tragedy as a common visitor. His mother’s three cousins—­who lived in the same
small town of Tonawanda, New York—­all went missing in the
same week during the Allied Invasion of Normandy. Their story
Jump Back Together (Resilience)
49
became the basis of Saving Private Ryan. A year later, John’s
uncle Tom returned home to Tonawanda after being seriously
wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. The very next day, Tom’s
older brother William died while working at the local steel mill.
“They just lived with this adversity all the time, so that’s how you
were raised. ‘Listen, the other shoe’s gonna drop, so get ready.’”
That mentality guided John’s reactions to suffering as he grew
up, and it guided his approach to creating tough teams. It was no
coincidence that players came up to him one after another, right
after jumping out of the window of a broken airplane, to half-­
jokingly, half-­appreciatively recite one of their coach’s favorite
mantras: “sudden change, sudden change.”
In the wake of the team’s near-­death experience, John could
have doubled down on the importance of hard-­nosed resilience.
He could have assumed the role of Central Casting Coach and
vigorously rallied his troops, freshly emerged from a battle with
fate. Time to get back to work, win the Big Ten, and punch a
ticket to the Big Dance.
He didn’t. “I read the room and just thought these kids were
raised a little differently than me. They’re really shocked by this,
like I am. But I’m putting up this facade that I’m not shocked,
that I’ve got to be the strong one. At that point, we’d already had
counselors come in, and I stepped back and didn’t say anything
anymore.” John had learned one way to be a bounce-­back guy
growing up, and he knew that the young men playing for him
now—­children of a culture 45 years after that of John’s youth—­
were learning another.
The counselors took the lead, and John let the players decide
what would happen next. “We can’t force it on them. We have to
have empathy and understand them. They were shook. I could
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
have ruined that situation by not understanding. As a coach,
I had to lead differently than I was led.”
John and his staff put the team up in a local hotel and gave
them a choice. Their bags were already packed for Washington.
The bus would come at six o’clock the next morning to take them to
the airport—­this time, the one in Detroit. The players could decide
whether they wanted to go or not. “If you’re on that bus, we’re
gonna go play the game,” John told them. “If you’re not, I get it.”
The rest of the story sounds like an old sports movie, and
it’s exactly why March Madness continues to capture Americans’
attention even in our hyperfractured media scene. The players all
showed up at six, got on the bus, and flew to DC. After landing,
they drove directly to the arena and played the first game of the
Big Ten tournament in their practice shirts; their team cargo had
gotten tied up in the damaged plane. They didn’t have time for
the typical pregame film study or scouting report, having barely
made it to the arena on time. “We’d been getting ready all year
for that game,” John says. “I told them to just go play.”
They won by 20 points. When John got to the locker room
after finishing his postgame interviews, the team exploded in
cheers and doused him with all the water bottles they could find.
Next came Purdue. The Boilermakers had the best record
in the Big Ten, a top-­15 ranking in the nation, and Caleb Swanigan, a six-­foot-­nine, 260-­pound force who’d just been named a
consensus First Team All-­American. Michigan won again, and
again the players deluged John with water bottles as he entered
the locker room. A new, wet tradition had been born.
Minnesota awaited them in the semi-­final. Michigan started
strong, but in the second half the upheaval and exhaustion of the
last few days finally got to them. Minnesota tied the game.
Jump Back Together (Resilience)
51
John called a timeout. When the players reached the huddle, he didn’t talk about tactics. “Usually I’d be more demonstrative. But my instincts told me to read the room again,” John says,
remembering how he’d forced himself to step back after everyone safely evacuated the plane a few days earlier. “They didn’t
need to hear about basketball. They needed to hear about life,
about how appreciative we were to be in this game, and how I
don’t know what’s going to happen here. Just go play your best,
because this would be a great story to tell one day if we can get
this thing done.
“We loved them. We loved them during that timeout
and just said, ‘Look what we’ve done. Wouldn’t this be special if
we just finished this thing off? We’ve been through a lot. This is
nothing right now. Let’s go finish it off.’”
Michigan pulled ahead and won the game. In the conference
championship game the next day, Michigan won by 15, completing their stunning run to the Big Ten title and guaranteeing a
place in March Madness.
Less than a week later in the first round of the NCAA tournament, Michigan edged out Oklahoma State in a high-­scoring
shootout. Thirty-­two teams in the country remained alive for the
championship.
Two days later, they met Louisville. Michigan entered the
game as massive underdogs—­Louisville was a contender to eventually win the national title. At the helm of the team stood Donovan Mitchell, a highly skilled sophomore who’d go on to become
one of the best guards in the NBA. After trailing for most of the
game, John and the Michigan Wolverines tied the game, fought
back and forth with Louisville in the closing minutes, and came
out ahead. They’d made the Sweet Sixteen.
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
After five wild postgame dousings from his team, John
had had enough. His wife Kathleen decided that her husband
was overpowered in those locker room celebrations and created another sudden change for his team. She secretly handed a
Super Soaker off to the team equipment manager, who tucked it
away in case Michigan beat the heavily favored Louisville. When
they did, John took the water gun, crept up to the locker room
entrance, and burst through, drawing first splash before anyone
could unscrew the cap from a water bottle. The players, who’d
secured Michigan’s best postseason finish in three years, erupted
in the loudest shouts of the entire run.
Two weeks before, they’d been a fringe contender for the
tournament, bandied about by relentless Midwestern winds and
slipping down the inflated safety chutes of a grounded jet. They’d
responded with understated resilience and dreamlike success.
Although they lost in the next round of the NCAA tournament
to end their season, over the next three seasons Michigan won
19 of their 23 elimination games. They won the Big Ten tournament again the next year and made it all the way to the national
championship game. Michigan’s resilience, and John’s appreciation for the different shapes that resilience can take, wasn’t just
an ingredient for a Hollywood ending to 2017. It stayed with the
program for years afterward.
One Big Lesson
Resilience in groups can lead to phenomenal short-­term
success, but it’s also powerful in the long-­term response to
trauma.
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53
Resilience in Groups
The Michigan basketball team showcases how resilience can
function as a feature of groups. We can encourage individual
people to build their resilience, but we can also use structures
and patterns of behavior to make collections of people resilient,
too. We’re living in the aftermath of the biggest disruption to
life around the world in decades: creating a healthy, prosperous
world after Covid-­19 requires a new commitment to making our
teams, families, organizations, communities, and countries more
resilient together as holistic units. It’s not enough to insist that
every single person steel themselves against adversity and learn
to rebound like a rubber band whenever anything horrific happens. We need to create resilient cultures where we can support
each other’s jumpbacks.
In the wake of the plane malfunction, Michigan players,
coaches, and counselors leaned against each other to heal, adapt,
and bounce back to a strength they’d never had before. How can
we apply that lesson broadly as we rebuild a postpandemic world?
Our next story illustrates how relationships between just
two people can not only inspire resilience, but also create entirely
new paths for our lives. Here’s the story of Stella Valle, courtesy
of Ashley Jung.
Crush Your Dreams
Ashley Jung’s sister Paige Walker had completed three years at
West Point and was nursing a nagging shoulder injury. With the
United States reducing its presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, the
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
Army told Walker that when she finished her education at West
Point, she’d have to go back to the civilian world. Her injury
would get her a medical retirement instead of a commission to
join the Army as an officer. As the rest of her classmates earned
their diplomas and became second lieutenants, Walker would
take her diploma and start over. Throughout her fourth year, she
fought the decision, determined to take her martial education
into active duty. One month before graduation, the Army issued
a final decision: she wasn’t medically eligible for commission.
Ashley had also graduated from West Point and was finishing her five-­year commitment as an active-­duty officer just as
Walker was set to graduate. Walker called her sister in a panic,
desperate for some advice.
“What do I do?” Walker asked. “I have no resume, I have no
idea what I’m going to do with my life.”
Ashley asked what she wanted to do, what she cared about.
What she might want to be doing in the future.
“Fashion,” Walker said.
“You couldn’t have told me anything that was going to be
harder coming from West Point,” Ashley said. The sisters teamed
up anyway.7
They both accepted corporate jobs and continued thinking about a way to break into the fashion industry. That fall,
they started Stella Valle, a jewelry brand for women. One year
into her day job and living with her parents in New Jersey,
Walker had rapidly risen in the ranks of her new company and
saved a lot of money, but felt unsatisfied. Now was the time to
make a bet: leave her corporate gig behind, rely on her savings
to fund the company and pay her bills, and commit to building
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55
Stella Valle full-­time. The choice didn’t thrill her parents, but
Walker decided to make it work—­and quickly, before her savings ran dry.
The sisters knew that Walker’s cash alone wouldn’t get the
company going fast enough. That’s when their sister Kate suggested that they try to get on Shark Tank. Walker went to the
show’s website, submitted a blurb about Stella Valle, and crossed
her fingers. They kept building their business.
A year later, they got on the show. Over 37,000 businesses
had applied to appear on that season of Shark Tank, of which
about 100 got flown to Los Angeles for taping. After pitching
Stella Valle to the hosts, Ashley and Walker got multiple investment offers and partnered with Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner. It
was nearly miraculous to get on the show at all. Partnering with
the investors they were after just sweetened the deal, and gave
them a needed influx of cash.
But even the Shark Tank coup wasn’t a cure-­all for the challenges of starting a business from scratch in a hypercompetitive
industry. “We were super-­young entrepreneurs and didn’t have
the perspective that we have now,” Ashley says. “We really tried
to get Mark and Lori to be involved at the strategic level, to help
coach us and mentor us, because that’s what we really wanted.
Yes, we wanted the money. But we needed the mentorship and
the coaching more.”
With so many opportunities from Cuban and Greiner, Ashley
and Walker realized that they’d diverged from their original vision
for growing the brand. They no longer had complete control over
the destiny of the business, and worried about not telling their
story in their own way. They’d started the company to empower
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
women and create jewelry that was rooted in both feminine fashion and their military background. Stella Valle just wouldn’t be as
powerful or successful if they couldn’t communicate that story to
customers. They needed to return to the origin of their company,
even though that meant ending their partnership with the very
prominent, very connected Shark Tank investors.
Ashley and Walker were looking for substantive relationships with both hands-­on mentors and the people who might
buy and appreciate Stella Valle pieces. To build those relationships, they’d first have to step back. “We were brand-­new entrepreneurs, so we felt kind of defeated. We felt like we were on an
island, all on our own.”
Even if they were on their own, their business grew from
a lifelong bond. Stella Valle emerged from that panicked phone
call from West Point just before Walker’s graduation, as each
of them questioned how to move into the next part of her life.
According to Ashley, their day-­
to-­
day commitment to each
other keeps the business, and them as people, running. “The ups
and downs of business are crazy, and we’ve always managed to
balance each other out. So when I’m super stressed about something in the business, Paige’ll say, ‘Okay, we have this to look
forward to, this is coming, don’t be stressed, let’s think about it
positively.’ And then vice versa: when she’s stressed about something, I say, ‘Let’s think about this like this, we have this coming up.’ We always are trying to keep each other motivated and
positive.”
The relationship at the foundation of their business helped
them redirect their strategy. To teach potential customers exactly
what Stella Valle stood for, they invested in communicating
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57
directly with those customers. They rebuilt their website, which
tells visitors their story:
We created Stella Valle to give women the inspiration and confidence to do anything they dream, just as we followed our dreams
to be designers despite our military backgrounds. We live by the
motto: CRUSH YOUR DREAMS and want you to do the same!8
They hired a digital marketing firm to help them find customers directly, so they could control Stella Valle’s message and their
sales channels. It paid off. When Stella Valle began, they sold exclusively wholesale to third-­party vendors and boutiques. Then they
found themselves focused on selling on QVC. Today, direct-­to-­
customer sales account for about 90 percent of Stella Valle’s business.
They’ve hired employees, worked with multiple factories, and built
a space of their own. Their flagship store in New Hope, Pennsylvania, sits halfway between Ashley and Walker’s homes. In the front
of the store, customers can browse Stella Valle jewelry, learn about
the company, and make purchases. Just behind the retail space, Ashley, Walker, and the development team have their office. In keeping
with their focus on connecting with people, they’ve set up the space
so that they can always see and be seen by their customers.
As much as their relationship makes them and Stella Valle
more resilient, they’ve also had to protect the sibling bond that
gives the relationship its power. The world is rife with stories
of estranged business partners, whether they’re siblings, friends,
or just strategically paired people. Being family doesn’t prevent
disagreements, conflicts, and resentments, especially when you
spend so much time with someone else. Walker and Ashley work
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
together “all day every day,” live close by, and spend many weekends together, either by themselves or with their broader family.
For many people, it’s a situation that could easily turn sour.
“One thing that our parents have always said to us is,
‘You’re sisters first, and you’re business partners second.
Nothing comes between you as family members,’” Ashley says.
“There’ve been times when we’ve had to remember that. There
are times when we do disagree on things, but we always—­no
matter what happens in the business or where it goes—­we’re
always family first. That’s been important in us being able to
continue to grow, and grow the business together, and not hurt
our relationship.”
Ashley Jung and Paige Walker demonstrate that resilience
in relationships can start with just two people and eventually
inform the character of a much larger group. In their case, it’s
Stella Valle. Like John Beilein, Ashley and Walker’s story isn’t
about the inherent stick-­to-­it-­iveness of one especially resilient
person. The much more potent phenomenon, and the far more
interesting one, is the emergent resilience of relationships. We
don’t just add up our individual resilience to get some collective resilience score. We amplify our own resilience when we
engage and commit to others, particularly in times of doubt
and struggle.
One Big Lesson
Resilience doesn’t have to be about responding to one particular setback. Strong relationships can help us stay resilient
in a variety of challenges, so long as we face them together.
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Perception and Reality
In the previous chapter, we saw how Dr. Virginia Hill created a
culture of forgiveness in her school. Strong leaders can also foster structural resilience especially well in education. The mixture
of students, parents, teachers, administrators, and community
members creates a complicated political system, but one that by
its very diversity can help pull everyone up. Sometimes that resilience even starts with a self-­imposed error.
Liz MacWilliams learned that lesson as a very young leader.
Liz first became a principal at 27. She’s now the principal at Carroll Magnet Middle School in Raleigh, North Carolina, a post
she took on when she was just 32. When she started at Carroll,
the school was in the early stages of transformation. It was significantly underperforming, and many families and community
members had lost faith in the school. “You go in, and you want to
build these authentic relationships,” Liz says, “but you also have
to recognize that in order to do that, you have to work for your
reputation, and people have to see you. Until you can establish
yourself, and until you can ensure that there is shared vision and
shared thinking around a desired outcome, you’re going to have
all of these incredibly talented, smart people going in different
directions.”9
Regaining the trust of the community was a top priority
for getting the school back on track. Liz chose to build those
relationships one by one in the most literal and time-­intensive
way possible: she’d visit the home of every student. Rather than
hope for perfect attendance at school events like open houses,
she’d bring the school to each family. “Sometimes we mistake
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
hard-­working parents. We mistake their absence for a lack of
interest,” she told NBC News. “I found that’s not the case.”10 One
by one, Liz forged deeper relationships with Carroll’s students,
met their parents and siblings, and showed how engaged she
wanted to be in the lives of everyone who was a part of Carroll.
“I wanted to ensure that every member of the community felt
like they belonged in the community.”
Still, the teachers weren’t convinced. Although the home
visits seemed to be paying off with more engaged kids and better
relationships with parents, Liz realized that she’d come to Carroll assuming that her new team shared her core beliefs. She’d
assumed that they’d immediately raise their expectations for
what the school could achieve. She’d naively expected that her
staff would consider her hard work as an example to follow and
feel inspired to replicate it.
She quickly learned that the staff had received a very different message. Teachers and administrators saw the home visits as
a flashy program intended to boost Liz’s profile, not improve the
school. It was “The MacWilliams Show.” Liz had already thrown
herself into making Carroll an inclusive place where everyone
felt seen and heard, but to many teachers, the spotlight was only
big enough for her. She had created an unforeseen obstacle:
earning trust with adults on her team who now met her work
with skepticism. “There are so many things that we do as leaders
that we think are really good things,” she says. “But if we don’t
really think through all of the implications, we won’t achieve
what we’ve set out to do.”
A 2016 teacher survey focusing on the climate, culture, and
leadership of the school revealed unsettling results. Liz had to
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61
bounce back from a problem of her own well-­intentioned making. She encouraged the staff to join her on home visits, invited
them to her home for professional learning sessions focused on
team-­building, and continuously sought feedback to face the
problem. She tracked her progress with survey data, anecdotal
reports, and one-­
on-­
one conversations. Her most consistent
technique, though, was a habit of reflective resilience. “Part of
this process is being really deeply self-­reflective, and every night
thinking back and just asking, ‘What’s my value-­add? What was
my impact today? How am I going to be better tomorrow, so that
I can build authentic trust and capacity?’”
To bounce back from the initial impression that Liz made on
Carroll’s faculty and staff, she put daily measures in place to make
sure that she was on the right track. She made herself accessible
with an open-­door policy and constant communication. She gave
her phone number to faculty, staff, and parents in the community.
She regularly shared her failures and posted feedback she received
along with what she’d do to address it. She paired her energy and
commitment with the self-­awareness, vulnerability, and perspective to change her strategy whenever necessary.
It worked. As her relationships strengthened, academic and
satisfaction data at Carroll improved significantly. The school
was removed from the state’s list of low-­performing schools.
In the fall of 2019, Liz chose to take a leave of absence to care
for her dying mother. For her first week away from the school,
she checked in regularly with her team, but caring for her mom
quickly became a full-­time job. The Carroll community had to
continue their work without her. As Liz, who’d thrown so much
of herself into the job, stepped away for one of life’s most trying
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and tender moments, her team found a new level of strength.
“The faculty and staff were incredible. They really showed up
and did fantastic work. Some laughed and said they wore their
What Would Elizabeth Do bracelets.”
The so-­called MacWilliams Show had gone from a term
of derision to the inspiration for high performance in a time
of trial. After years of establishing and growing relationships,
Liz had built a community that was inspired and able to rise
to the occasion in her absence. The high expectations for student success and community values were no longer just a message from the principal, but an ingrained part of the culture of
the school.
One Big Lesson
Relationships help us understand exactly what other people want and need. That knowledge can help us assess our
challenges more accurately and recover from setbacks.
Facing Every Unique Trial
Resilience takes as many shapes as the challenges that forge it. Resilient leadership, then, isn’t monolithic or predictable, or something
that fits neatly into a how-­to guide. In this chapter, we explored
three stories of resilience, all distinct in character: Michigan Basketball’s made-­for-­Hollywood aviation accident and their triumphant postseason response; Ashley Jung and Paige Walker’s
decision to turn rejection into opportunity and continue finding
promise in setback; and Liz MacWilliams’s nonstop engagement
Jump Back Together (Resilience)
63
in relationships as a way to combat the inevitable crises that face
a school community.
We don’t know what darkness awaits us in our lives, lurking
in a corner and anxious to upset our hopes. We can, however,
find solace and inspiration from those that have met that darkness with flexibility, reflection, and strength. Although resilience
can be practiced alone as the admirable virtue of a determined
soul, it flourishes in community. In relationships, we see each
other’s struggles and lend a hand; we jump as a team when we
simply can’t muster the strength alone. We jump back into our
lives, confident that we can make things better together.
Takeaways
• Although resilience has become a trendy virtue to
encourage in individuals (and especially children), it’s
best understood as a feature of healthy, thriving groups.
We are most resilient in community.
• Resilience isn’t about getting back to where we were. It’s
about choosing to act bravely in moments of darkness
and end up in places we might not have foreseen.
• We can act with resilience after all kinds of setbacks.
Dramatic, life-­defining events aren’t a prerequisite for
fostering a culture of resilience and preparing for the
inevitable hard times to come.
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Questions for Reflection
• Are you a member of a resilient community? It could be
your family, workplace, neighborhood, or another part of
life. Which features of that group inspire resilience?
• How can you make the groups you belong to more
­resilient?
• Think of a time when other people helped you bounce
back from a mistake, setback, or suffering. What did
people do to help you jump back into your life? How
might you do the same for others?
• How might you lean on your relationships to be resil-
ient in the postpandemic world? How could a resilient
culture benefit your community in this unique time?
CHAPTER
4
The Vocabulary of
Trust (Trust)
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
O
ur interviews with leaders for this book covered a lot of
ground, but one thing that always came up was trust.
Leader after leader mentioned how integral trust was to doing
great work, and how strong relationships were the best way to
build and maintain that trust over time. Trust can be slippery,
though: We know it when we feel it, but what is it, really? And
when people say that trust allows them to do great work, what
exactly does that mean?
In this chapter, we’ll explore those questions with specific
examples of trust in action. You’ll hear from four leaders, each from
a different kind of pursuit. In all of their stories, trust isn’t just a platitude: it’s a concrete goal that astute leaders work to create each day.
I’m in Their Corner
One Friday morning in the middle of winter, management consultant Kelly Swaintek got an unexpected call from a client. “Oh
jeez. Where are we going here?” she thought to herself. Relationships with clients are crucial, and Kelly wasn’t sure what to
make of an out-­of-­the-­blue call. She picked up the phone.
“I tell your team this, but I want to make sure that you hear
it,” the client said.
“Okay,” Kelly replied, her unease not exactly lessened.
“Your team cares more about my business than some of my
employees do. They care more about getting to the right answer,
developing my team, giving them feedback, and coaching them.
It’s building our business.”
Kelly finished the conversation and breathed a sigh of relief.
That surprise Friday call wasn’t the bombshell she’d feared. It
was validation.
The Vocabulary of Trust (Trust)
67
“That was my drop-­the-­mic moment,” she says. “I called my
team and said: ‘Folks, I was pretty low-­energy at the start of the
day, but my cup just got filled. I could not be more proud of what
y’all are doing.’”1
The call was clear evidence that the account was going well,
of course, but it meant more than that to Kelly. “Those clients
are going to be my friends, and I’m going to meet them down the
road. They’re not just a revenue line for me.”
Kelly is a partner at the consulting firm Bain & Company,
where she manages teams of consultants in the utilities and
energy industries. She’s also a senior leader at the company’s new
office in Austin, Texas. When we say “new,” we mean very new.
Postpandemic new. Kelly moved her family to Texas to get the
office started, and Covid-­19 hit soon after. The team that Kelly
was so proud of? She hadn’t met a single one of them in person.
She hadn’t met a single client in person, either. When lockdowns
began all over the country, she went out of her way to create a
culture of trust despite all of the structural challenges that the
pandemic created.
“I’m not a planful person. I’m not an organized person. But
I have time on my calendar that tells me to go randomly ping,
randomly call, or randomly Zoom-­bomb someone. I say, ‘Hey, I
just wanted to do what I’d do if I were in the office.’ I’d swing
by someone’s desk and ask how they’re doing and it wouldn’t be
scheduled. You’ve got to do that, so that people start seeing you
as a person and start understanding you.”
After four years as a cadet at West Point and five years as
an active-­duty Army officer, Kelly went to business school at
Columbia. When she graduated, she joined Bain, where she
wanted to learn about as many industries as possible and figure
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out where she’d fit in post-­military life. “I knew nothing about
the civilian world. I’d just spent time in Iraq. I knew Iraq.” After
three years working in Bain’s private equity and hedge funds
group, she wanted a change. She’d become a manager, but once
again needed to figure out how to keep learning.
She consulted the head of her office, who had become a
mentor. As someone who knew her and her work, what did he
think that she should do?
“I think you’d like the two people who run our utilities
practice,” he told her.
“I’ve been doing cool stuff in private equity and hedge funds.
Utilities?” she asked.
“Kelly,” he said, “I know you well, and I know your style. I
think you’re highly affiliative, and I think you’d blossom under
their leadership.”
A month later, one of those utilities leaders called Kelly
on the phone and asked if she wanted to join them. Kelly still
didn’t know a thing about utilities. “I didn’t know how the lights
turned on or gas flowed. I just knew that I could flip the switch
and start the burner, and it would work.” She also knew that
she could trust her mentor’s advice and judgment. “I had established no trust with them, but I trusted my mentor. So I guess by
extension I trusted these folks. I said yes.”
To build trust with her new bosses, she admitted to how little
she knew on Day One. She told them she’d be asking a lot of dumb
questions and learning as much as she could. They supported her all
the more and gave her the time and opportunity to make mistakes.
After transferring to utilities, she quickly rose to partner. Trust in
her mentor had led her to utilities, and the trust she created with
The Vocabulary of Trust (Trust)
69
humility and candor rocketed her up the corporate ladder. “I’ve
achieved my greatest outcomes when I’ve been in a trust-­based
relationship,” Kelly says. “When you’re in a low-­trust relationship,
so much mental energy is spent thinking, ‘Well, did they react that
way because I said the wrong thing? Is that because I’m a woman?
Or is that because I’m an Asian? Or is that because I’m a veteran,
and they think I chewed rocks in a prior life?’ In a trust-­based relationship, people achieve extraordinary things.”
Trust also informs how she behaves as a manager and senior leader:
My teams have achieved their greatest work when they feel like
I’m not judging them or questioning how smart they are. They
already hear all that bad stuff in their heads. My job is to relinquish them of all that mental energy, of thinking about whether
they’re good enough or whether they deserve to be here. My job
is to let folks know that I’m in their corner and I want nothing
more than for them to be successful.
Kelly’s focus on creating trust-­
based relationships goes
far beyond the typical management playbook. It’s not enough
to share performance rubrics, give feedback, and act with some
degree of “transparency.” Trust comes from a substantive relationship between two people; it isn’t a product of templatized
transactions that can just be replicated and mechanically applied
to each member of a reporting chain.
Kelly considers building relationships and nurturing people
the most important part of her job as a leader. Particularly during the pandemic, she’s told the people she works with more and
more about her own life, so they’ll feel comfortable sharing the
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same kinds of stories with her. “When you’re vulnerable, people
start connecting with you and getting to know you. You let your
walls down and it becomes a safe space,” she says. “That’s the
first step to building trust. That person understands that they’re
holding this fragile part of you in their hands. So everyone’s been
seeing my hot mess of a pandemic year.” That approach encourages her younger employees to share the difficulties of working from a closet during the pandemic, or getting rejected from
graduate school, or caring for a sick family member. Once their
boss makes clear that they can talk as people about life’s trials,
they worry less about constantly proving their own competence
and instead discuss the topics that matter most to both their jobs
and their lives. It’s a far cry from the standard small-­talk relationship at work, in which conversations revolve around the weather,
little details of office life, and a superficial sociality. Small talk
may have its role, but it’s hardly the bedrock of trust.
Kelly’s mission to foster trust also allows her to call out damaging behavior in a productive way. She can point people’s attention to awkward moments in the spirit of mutual improvement
rather than condemnation. “If you have a trust-­based relationship, people assume positive intent. It’s not that I’m judging you,
and now you have to get defensive.” During a recent meeting, a
client used an offensive term that, according to Kelly, “two years
ago no one would have thought anything of.” She sent the client
a message immediately after; although she felt very uncomfortable pointing the moment out, she felt the need to address it. “I
probably would not have sent that note if I didn’t feel like we had
a good relationship,” she says. The client told her that no one
else had said anything, and they were thankful that Kelly had.
They’d make sure not to speak that way in the future.
The Vocabulary of Trust (Trust)
71
Kelly’s emphasis on trust-­based relationships should ring
especially true for those of us who’ve worked for callous, unfeeling bosses. (If you haven’t, consider yourself among the blessed.)
However skilled you might be at your job, that’s no match for the
constant anxiety of working for someone who seems ready and
willing to hand you a pink slip.
We believe that you ought to care about people and enjoy
the trust that springs from that care for its own sake. But even if
you only care about your organization’s bottom line, you should
care about trust. Trust-­based relationships allow us to do better
work and feel better while we’re at it. When we trust each other,
especially those we’re working beside, we free ourselves from
always looking over our shoulders. We can direct our energy
toward better and more profound things. We may even head in
entirely unexpected directions.
One Big Lesson
Relationships rooted in trust help people spend less time
and energy justifying themselves, and more time doing
meaningful work.
The Our, the Us, and the We
Kelly Swaintek and Dr. Chaveso Cook share a similar approach
to building trust on teams, especially when one person has power
over the other. Power imbalance exists in many of our relationships, and probably more than we’d care to think about. We might
be higher or lower in the company pecking order, we might be a
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teacher or a student, or one person in the relationship might even
be powerful enough to dictate the other’s actions. That’s particularly true in the military, where the chain of command is integral
to daily culture and an order from above can decide who lives and
who dies. By default, hierarchy governs military relationships.
Chaveso emphasizes a surprising word when it comes to
leadership: reciprocity. Like Kelly, Chaveso graduated from West
Point. He’s been an Army officer ever since. He also started and
leads Military Mentors, a nonprofit organization that focuses
on the art and science of mentorship to protect military members from failed leadership. He describes an experience that’s
common in both the military and civilian employment: a boss
reviewing employee performance records. When you’re an
employee, your boss can easily pull up your most recent employee
reviews, along with detailed testimonials to how successful (or
unsuccessful) you’ve been. “When’s the last time your boss actually
showed you their reports? What do their bosses think of them? We
just don’t do that,” Chaveso says.2 Rank and status start the relationship off on uneven ground, even for well-­intentioned leaders.
In structures designed to fortify hierarchy, Chaveso decided
to lead with reciprocity. “I have habitually shown my stuff,” he
says. “I show my Officer Evaluation Reports when I counsel people, and I show them to noncommissioned officers, too. It makes
them totally uncomfortable at first, but I ask them, ‘Well, if I
can see all your stuff, isn’t it kind of unfair that you can’t see my
stuff?’” Lest you think this is a very elaborate way to humblebrag,
Chaveso keeps documents chronicling all of his failures. He’s
created a Failure Resume, which includes schools that rejected
him, positions he was nominated for but not given, mistakes he
The Vocabulary of Trust (Trust)
73
made as a young officer, and even behavior in his family life that
he considers failure. He doesn’t show it only to trusted mentees,
either: he’s published it online. “I’m not worried about anybody
seeing it. If anything, I’ve found over time that my relationships
with folks, especially subordinates, have grown stronger, because
they finally see me as human.” Just as Kelly puts herself on the
line in her relationships by sharing her vulnerabilities, Chaveso
makes sure that people know that he hasn’t just skipped from one
glorious victory to the next.
“Everyone can look us up on LinkedIn. They see all the little fellowships and the partnerships, and you’re on this board and
that, but there’s no way on LinkedIn to say that this is something
I screwed up unless you’re very deliberate about how and what
you share. The Failure Resume itself required little time. It’s a
two-­page document that is one of the best things I’ve created
for building trust and showing true vulnerability.” The Failure
Resume also serves as an instrument of reciprocity. As a leader
in both the military and nonprofit realms, Chaveso has to face
and adjudicate others’ failures all the time. The Failure Resume
proves that he’s willing to fess up to his own. Scratch that—
broadcast his own to whomever is interested.
Chaveso also believes that everyone is a leader, and everyone has the capacity for leadership. “If we always come from that
angle, it just lifts people up,” he says. “If you look at every single
person in your organization as a leader and not just another follower, it breaks our relationships up in a different way, and we
can become closer.” Starting as a second lieutenant and still not
long out of West Point, Chaveso changed his use of the standard
terminology for new enlisted soldiers. He and a platoon sergeant
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led their unit together. When brand-­new privates arrived to join
the platoon, the sergeant would play bad cop and make the new
soldier do push-­ups, flutter kicks, and the standard military initiation fare. Then he’d hand the private off to good cop Cook,
who’d calmly sit at his computer and walk the private through
intake questions. While they were at it, Chaveso would ask about
the soldier’s family, birthday, or anything else to start building a
shared understanding of each other.
Soldiers this new to the Army are typically referred to as
“junior enlisted.” That didn’t match Chaveso’s understanding of
everyone as a leader:
The last thing I told them before they walked away was: “Hey,
think of yourself as a leader today. You might feel like the lowest man in the field. But you’re a leader because someone else is
coming behind you. Someone is going to show up here in two or
three weeks, and you’re going to have two or three weeks in the
unit. You’re going to be in the barracks telling them, “Hey, avoid
this person, do this, make sure you’re on time, this is what time
we get up.” You’re going to automatically fall into that leadership
role.” Since then, I got rid of the terminology “junior enlisted.”
For me, it has always been sorta like a curse word. I always call
them “junior leaders.”
Chaveso also uses small language changes to create reciprocity and trust in structurally hierarchical relationships. He’s largely
removed “my” and “mine” from his vocabulary, unless he’s taking
blame for an error. Once he advanced high enough in the Army to
request that others do the same, he did. “When I was a company
commander, I was really, really, really, really specific about never
The Vocabulary of Trust (Trust)
75
saying my company, my office, my area,” he says. “I would correct
other people too. When someone would say, ‘I gotta look out
for my guys,’ I’d say, ‘Those are our guys.’ We’re all on this team
together. I was always trying to press the our, the us, and the we.”
Chaveso’s efforts didn’t relieve him of the burdens of leadership. He still had to make hard choices and unpopular decisions. The trust he’d built through radical reciprocity, though,
allowed him to lead more effectively and with a broader base of
support. The people he led had learned about his failures, seen
him as a fellow human being, and been respected as leaders in
their own right. Chaveso had proven to them every day that he
wasn’t some hotshot seeking personal glory. He was a part of the
group and acted in the interests of the group. Quite simply, they
could trust him.
Just as one trusted relationship changed the course of Kelly
Swaintek’s career, one relationship early in Chaveso’s life inspired
his passion for mentorship. After high school, he enrolled in West
Point Prep in hopes of gaining admission to West Point. He was
the first person from his school to get a spot at West Point Prep,
and no one in his family had had any experience with military
life. When Chaveso came home to talk to high school kids about
the opportunity, he met a young man three years younger than
him named Danny Priester. Priester was a member of Junior
ROTC and was interested in attending West Point, but he didn’t
look like a future cadet to Chaveso.
Priester offered to take Chaveso out to lunch to talk about
West Point and what he’d have to do to get in. Chaveso accepted.
“I don’t know if West Point is the thing for you, man,”
Chaveso told him.
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“No, it is,” Priester said. “I gotta change my circumstances.”
After lunch, Chaveso talked to Priester’s teachers. They told
him that Priester was a good student—­he just needed a push to
stop messing around outside of school. Priester responded. He
started turning things around and becoming a leader in his high
school class. He took up golf and got good enough that colleges
began recruiting him. He was putting in the work to change his
circumstances, just as he’d promised Chaveso.
Then his family’s home caught fire. Priester managed to
escape. His mom did, too. His dad didn’t. Priester was nearing
the end of his high school journey, in the middle of deciding
what to do with his life, and on track to accomplish his goal of
attending West Point Prep. But now his role model and superhero was suddenly gone and he felt the need to take care of his
mom. They’d lost everything. Literally everything, up in flames.
He’d have to cast aside his new activities and do whatever was
necessary to get by.
Priester’s mom and his teachers immediately contacted
Chaveso. “Mentor this gentleman,” they told him. “Don’t let
him walk away from this opportunity. This is tough, but he has
a chance.”
So Chaveso did. “I think that solidified our mentorship
relationship,” Chaveso says. Priester trusted Chaveso’s guidance
and stayed the course despite the shambles that fate had cruelly
heaved into his life.
Priester went to West Point Prep, and then West Point. He
played varsity golf during his time at the academy and followed
his West Point career with a successful run as a young Army
officer. That run has only continued since. As Chaveso says:
The Vocabulary of Trust (Trust)
77
One of the greatest moments of my personal and professional
life was standing on the field a couple of years ago at Fort Bragg,
watching Danny Priester take command of a set of infantrymen
in the 82nd. Paratroopers: the pinnacle of what you could be as
an infantryman. And him also being a minority is very important.
There’s not a lot of Black infantrymen out there that are also West
Pointers—­he’s in a very small demographic—­so to see him take
command on that field was simply amazing. For me to hug him, give
him a pound, and see all that had come to fruition was awesome.
That relationship, born of nothing more than a common
high school, has now lasted decades. The trust not only between
Chaveso and Priester, but also the trust placed in Chaveso by
Priester’s mother and teachers, helped Priester turn his life
around and kept him going when the unthinkable happened.
The two men’s bond also spawned a whole new web of positive relationships. “Our relationship is one of the reasons I do
this volunteer business,” Chaveso says, talking about the inspiration to start Military Mentors. “Danny and I have never been in
the same unit. We’ve barely been at the same place long enough
to high-­five each other. But all I’ve known is a brotherhood and
a connection through distance that mentorship allows. It creates
true, deep relationships.”
Chaveso even uses that relationship as a model for others.
“I always ask people, ‘Where’s your Danny?’ Are you looking at
someone who doesn’t look like they fit the mold and completely
turning them away? That’s not just turning them away from an
opportunity for them; it’s an opportunity for you as a leader to
really connect with somebody and build them developmentally
over time. That’s a relationship. That’s leadership. And certainly
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I think that is the definition of mentorship.” Military Mentors
now helps create those relationships between people all over
the country.
One Big Lesson
Commit to thinking of everyone as a leader, and talk
accordingly.
I’m Here, and I See That You’re There
If you’re at all like us, it surprised you that Chaveso and Priester
have spent so little time physically together. As Chaveso mentioned, that’s powerful on its own, but it’s also particularly
relevant after 2020. We should all be looking for examples of
relationships that thrive despite physical distance.
As most of the world locked down at the beginning of the
pandemic—­and as all kinds of institutions planned for a future
with dramatically more remote work, distance learning, and
video calls than all but the most zealous Silicon Valley types
anticipated—­leaders went scrambling for work-­from-­home tips
and tactics to avoid Zoom fatigue. As worthwhile as those might
be, we also need role models for remote relationship-­building. We
can optimize our homes, perfect our commute-­free routines, and
still easily forget to maintain our relationships. It’s even harder
to cultivate new ones in a remote-­first world. Still, to ignore relationships is to ignore a foundational piece of our humanity.
In the business world, few professionals build relationships
better or faster than recruiters. They’re in the proverbial people
The Vocabulary of Trust (Trust)
79
business, and in a distinctive way: they’re charged with finding
lots and lots of new people, making cold introductions, mounting
charm offensives, and building relationships that persist whether
the people they meet join their organization or not. Unlike salespeople, great recruiters also maintain relationships with people
they reject. They play the relationships long game. And while
high-­level executives might get wined and dined, a huge chunk
of recruiting still happens over phone calls and video messaging.
That’s why we talked to Erin Scruggs, a senior leader in
recruiting for tech companies. She’s currently the senior director of Talent Acquisition at LinkedIn, where she leads a team
of more than 130 employees. She does it from Central Maryland, nearly 3,000 miles from LinkedIn’s global headquarters in
Northern California. Erin didn’t skip town when the pandemic
hit, as so many internet workers did. She’s lived by the Chesapeake Bay the entire time she’s led her LinkedIn team.
“There was a lot of skepticism,” Erin says about her joining as
a fully remote employee in 2014, not even near LinkedIn’s satellite
office in New York. She’d left her previous job as a manager to go
back to being an individual contributor. She no longer had direct
reports, but she believed that she could do better work in her new
role. “I cared about the people a lot, and I’m always the person that
will absolutely say the truth. I would say, ‘Hey, people are feeling
this way,’ or, ‘You know, this is actually broken. That is a dumb
rule.’ I had some fearlessness.” What other people would gossip or
send emails about, “I would say out loud,” Erin says. “That helped
me to accelerate my journey. It was surprising. There were 10 people around a table and then there’s my face on the screen. I was an
anomaly, so it took intentionality to build authentic relationships.”3
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Less than two years into her individual contributor role,
Erin was promoted to manage once again, this time as the head
of executive recruiting for North America. “I was almost tricked
into leadership at LinkedIn,” she says. Her intentionality became
significantly more important now that she was a leader in a permanently remote situation. Erin hates small talk, “but I make
time for real connection. I have a whole page of notes on people’s
dogs’ names, people’s kids’ names. I try to get all of the milestones, the birthdays and anniversaries. I try to be thoughtful
about recognizing great work and sending gratitude and thank-­
yous and those kinds of things.” Erin insists that this isn’t part of
a highly organized grand strategy or even particularly difficult.
But as we also saw with Kelly Swaintek and Chevaso Cook, trust
gets built by small gestures. For every relationship forged in a
crucible, there are many, many more that develop over time as
people gradually grow together.
During the pandemic, Erin also let her team know that it
was all right to struggle. “During Covid, you’ve got two kids
punching each other right outside the frame of the webcam, and
you’ve got a dog eating something off the floor . . . so every
once in a while during a meeting, I’ll say, ‘It’s hard right now,
isn’t it? Why don’t we pause for 10 minutes and talk about what
the hardest thing you overcame this week was.’ It just creates
moments of humanity.”
Those moments don’t always have to come from trying
experiences. They work just as well when they add humor to otherwise perfunctory moments of remote work. Erin knows that
the person who runs an important part of the recruiting compliance process loves Harry Potter. Every so often, Erin sends her
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81
a video of Dobby the house elf (a beloved character in the Potterverse). “It’s just a simple, ‘Hey, I’m here, and I see that you’re
there,’” Erin says. “Whenever I hear that gross phrase ‘eating an
elephant’ in a meeting, I send an elephant meme to someone in
the meeting who’s not expecting it. They’re normally not someone I’m super close to, but we’re close enough that I can try to
get them to laugh during a meeting.” These little interventions
help Erin build trust with a team that’s not only large, but also
physically distributed. “It’s so simple. It doesn’t take a half-­hour
check-­in every other week. It’s just simple touchpoints to remind
people that I’m here, and we’re in it together.”
One Big Lesson
Small, habitual gestures of care build trusting relationships
over both time and distance.
Call Me Bob
So far, we’ve seen that little interventions and intentional language can build trust in the high-­stress world of management
consulting, the life-­
and-­
death world of the military, and the
constantly changing world of technology. They also work at the
highest levels of government.
In June 2014, Bob McDonald had been retired from Procter
& Gamble for less than a year. He’d enjoyed 34 successful years
at the firm, where he’d risen all the way to chairman of the board
and then CEO. For the past 11 months, he’d been working on
a number of projects, from charitable work with the Cincinnati
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
Museum Center to serving on several companies’ boards. Then
he got a call from the White House. Would he be interested in
becoming the new secretary of Veterans Affairs?
Heading up the VA, as it’s often referred to, meant joining
the Cabinet. If he were selected and passed the rigorous vetting
process, Bob would assume leadership over an agency tarred by
scandal. The previous secretary, a decorated former Army general, had resigned after a flurry of media reports that veterans
had died waiting for long-­awaited medical appointments and
that VA staffers had falsified data to cover up the extent of the
dysfunction. An internal audit, FBI probe, and White House
investigation were all underway. The VA remained America’s
largest provider of healthcare, but it needed an energetic boost.4
Bob interviewed with a slate of government officials. Then
he had a long, final interview with President Barack Obama. “I
told the president that I couldn’t take the job without my wife
being involved in the decision,” Bob says. That Sunday, Second
Lady Jill Biden hosted an event for Bob and his wife Diane at
the Naval Observatory, the official residence of the vice president. Bob traveled from the White House to the event. As he
walked through the property and toward the house, he tripped.
He looked down and saw two outstretched legs. Their owner
lounged outside in a simple T-­shirt, baseball hat, and sunglasses.
“I apologized right away,” Bob says. “I didn’t know who he was. I
thought he was the pool boy.” The man looked up, and Bob realized it wasn’t the pool boy. It was Joe Biden.
“So you’re the guy people want for this job,” Biden said.
“What do I need to do to convince you?”
The Vocabulary of Trust (Trust)
83
“You don’t have to convince me. You have to convince
my wife.”
The two of them walked into the house together and Biden
went right up to Diane. He told the McDonalds that he wasn’t
going to let them go until they accepted the job. Then the Bidens
gave them a tour of the house. Bob took note of how that tour
included not just the grand living spaces, but also the bedrooms
set aside for the Bidens’ grandchildren. “In those few minutes,”
Bob recalls, “I knew that I could work with Joe Biden because of
the way he valued family, and the way he valued the same things
that I valued. That was important to me.”5
As soon as Bob took the job, he set out on a 90-­day plan to
restore trust in the VA. Plenty of systems were still functioning at
a high level, but the scandals and media scrutiny of the past few
months had decimated employees’ and patients’ trust in the institution. “The only way you can rebuild trust is by creating relationships,” Bob says. “And they have to be intimate relationships.
I traveled constantly. At least one trip a day.” He wanted people
in every part of the sprawling organization to trust both him as
a leader and the difficult decisions he’d have to make to repair
the agency. But he also wanted to collect people’s thoughts, fears,
and experiences. He wanted them to trust that the VA’s plans
would reflect the real situations that they encountered:
I would bring together all the stakeholders, employees, managers, union leaders, and veterans services organizations and talk to
them, because I wanted to open my heart and have them see that
my motives were pure, that I wasn’t running for anything. I was
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
just trying to make veterans’ lives better. It’s easy for people to
criticize a huge, monolithic bureaucracy with no face. It’s harder
to criticize an organization dedicated to your betterment if you
can put a face with it, and you know that it has a pure heart.
When he’d host these meetings or just show up at a VA
facility somewhere in America, Bob used his own trust-­based
language: “Call me Bob.” The VA sits at the intersection of the
federal government, the military, and medicine—­all fields filled
with rigorous procedures, levels of hierarchy, and cultural formality, right down to what you can and can’t call your institutional superiors. The simple invitation to call the secretary by
his first name gave people associated with the VA an immediate, casual intimacy with Bob. It jump-­started relationships and
built trust.
If you force people to call you “Secretary,” Bob says, “you
walk into the room and there are tent cards on the table and
flags and everybody stands up when you walk in. Everybody will
always tell you what they think you want to hear. That’s not intimacy. You’re never going to understand the way the organization
really works.” Bob liberally gave out his phone number, too; if
anyone noticed something or had an idea, they should give Bob a
call. The agency could do serious, important work without calling each other by honorifics. In fact, they’d do better work if they
focused on relationships rather than pomp.
One story of the power of trust came from White River
Junction, Vermont. Staffers at the VA facility there had come to
know a patient so well that when he missed an appointment, they
sprang into action. They called the local police and requested a
The Vocabulary of Trust (Trust)
85
wellness check at the patient’s home. When officers arrived, they
found the patient stuck on the floor, unable to stand up after falling down. He needed medical attention immediately. The officers rushed him to the hospital and saved his life. Bob included
that story in the leadership training he hosted for VA staff. Only
by engaging in individual, time-­intensive relationships had the
employees in White River Junction gained the awareness to
register the man’s absence, realize that he could be in danger,
and make sure that first responders did something about it right
away.6 It was trust in action, and a vivid counterexample to the
negligence that had erupted in the appointments scandal.
One Big Lesson
Strip away unnecessary formalities and process to build
intimacy and shared trust.
The Common Thread
There’s an immeasurable variety of ways to build trust. In this
chapter, we’ve used four profiles to argue for one straightforward
strategy for leaders: be forthcoming with your own vulnerability
and use language that equalizes you and the people around you.
Speak intentionally to humble yourself and build trust. The stories we shared come from people in different sectors and with
different backgrounds, but this common thread appears in each.
Entire books could be (and have been) written about the psychology of trust. For now, we encourage you to start with the
way you speak, and build from there.
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
Takeaways
• Seemingly trivial changes to the words we use can build
or erode trust.
• Sharing uncomfortable vulnerability with someone is a
shortcut to having them see you as a fellow person and
begin to trust you.
• Reciprocity can help leaders narrow the power imbal-
ance between them and others. Flipping the privileges of
leadership paves the way for trust.
Questions for Reflection
• Which parts of your everyday vocabulary implicate your
team as equal contributors to a shared goal? Which parts
of your vocabulary distance other people or unnecessarily assert your authority?
• Which tender or private parts of your life might you
share with others in order to deepen your relationships
with them? What are you willing to share to make others
more comfortable in your company?
• With whom do you feel the most trust? What happened,
and what continues to happen, to foster that level of
trust?
CHAPTER
5
From Pie in the
Sky to History
(Coalition-­Building)
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
F
or complex operations that require cooperation, collaboration, and a united front, relationships give us our best chance
to form durable coalitions. Each person we win over becomes
an advocate for future converts. When we persuade by forming
relationships rather than with the kind of cartoonish coercion
you see in political dramas, we can build incredible teams and
accomplish seemingly impossible things.
We’re All on Board for This
Michael “Sully” Sullivan sat at his post in Afghanistan. It was
2009 and the United States had a new president, a new party
in control of government, and a new strategy for its wars in
the Middle East. Sully led a group of US Army Rangers—­also
known as Green Berets, and members of the elite Special Operations Command—­that wanted to use this moment to improve
the security of the allied coalition in Afghanistan.
In just a few months, many more American soldiers would
enter the country. To Sully, that surge came with a very big hitch:
many of the arriving troops would be walking into a powder keg.
He was particularly worried about Marjah, a rural area made up
of small village clusters and a few larger bazaars. British command held official jurisdiction and avoided large-­scale military
operations, so it ceded big strongholds to the Taliban. In those
strongholds, the Taliban amassed resources and mounted attacks
on coalition forces. Insurgents’ trucks drove around Marjah with
Soviet-­era anti-­aircraft guns and routinely fired on British helicopters in broad daylight. Armed combatants could move without fear
in Marjah, and they did so to their tremendous strategic advantage.1
From Pie in the Sky to History (Coalition-­Building)
89
A Taliban warlord could make money hand-­over-­fist from
the narcotics trade and immediately spend it on weapons and
fighters.2 The poppy seed and opium market in Marjah funneled
millions of dollars to Taliban fighters, who were now planning
to escalate attacks on the growing US presence in the region.3
At Marjah’s Loy Choreh Bazaar, the Taliban produced heroin
from raw opium, stored munitions, directed attacks, manufactured improvised explosive devices (often called IEDs), treated
their wounded soldiers before evacuating them across the Pakistani border, and hosted a shadow Taliban government for the
Helmand Province.4
Sully and his team saw all of this months in advance, and
pinpointed Marjah during predeployment research back in the
United States. Once they got to Afghanistan, they built relationships with political and community leaders around Marjah, along
with a corpus of evidence for what the Taliban was up to. Sully had
a big problem, though. His team’s stance bucked the standard wisdom about counterinsurgency. The Brits remained uninterested
in a bloody battle, and the American chain of command saw other
parts of Afghanistan as the best focus for the war. Widespread corruption in the new Afghan government and the Afghan National
Security Forces further complicated the situation.
To make matters worse, Marjah was practically a fortress.
It was hard to infiltrate and just as hard to get back out. According to one major Sully discussed the area with, “Short of siege
warfare, you’re not getting in. It’s literally got a moat around it.
It’s a medieval castle.”5
As Sully looked more and more into breaking up the threat
in Marjah, he realized that he’d only be able to execute the
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mission if he built a coalition. He’d need to convince his bosses,
of course, but he also wanted a wider, stronger coalition than that.
He worked to excite people significantly lower down the chain,
too, and even win over the British personnel who’d d
­ ismissed the
idea out of hand for so long. “Going all the way back to our predeployment training in Nevada, I always told our team that we’re
not going to be the team underneath headquarters that refuses to
work with the people who tell us what to do,” Sully says. “If we’re
not friends with them, and if we’re not figuring out how they
operate and what motivates them, we’re not doing it right.” It
would have been easy enough to flag Marjah in a planning meeting and fume off when any operation was inevitably rejected. But
that was both a waste of time and a betrayal of the mission. It also
would have cost lives. “The last thing we could do was just make
demands and say, ‘You guys are idiots if you don’t see the intelligence the same way that we do.’”
Sully made sure that commanders and generals started seeing the intelligence the same way. Rather than just laying all of
the intel out and asking for a thumbs-­up or a thumbs-­down, he
worked each important decision maker over time. “Our fear was
that once we really explained what was going on, most people
would think that this was more than we could handle. So that
was part of the relationship building.” Sully had to share intelligence and build trust stakeholder by stakeholder, or the whole
proposal would fall apart. “We had to say, ‘Hey, we really need to
not only build your understanding of the intelligence and how
we see the whole picture, but also confidence in us based on our
being able to unpack the work we’ve done and show that there
are still things that we don’t know.’” Little by little, the strategy
From Pie in the Sky to History (Coalition-­Building)
91
began to work. Highlighting gaps in their knowledge helped the
team fill those gaps in—­and everyone who added to the picture
became invested in the mission’s success.
That’s where co-­
author Mike comes in. Mike was a
28-­year-­old intelligence officer at the time, also deployed to
Afghanistan and working with special forces units. He, too,
was skeptical that the coalition should direct resources to the
impregnable Marjah, so Sully persuaded Mike to fly down and
meet in person. Getting this junior officer on board was another
key step in building a coalition, and he’d have to do it face to
face. “I remember having to wait for the flight out of Kandahar
Airfield and thinking that this was a real pain in the ass,” Mike
says. “Couldn’t we just have a call about this?”
Mike spent 24 hours with Sully and his team. “Two hours of
that was about Marjah specifically,” Mike says. The rest of their
time together was spent building a relationship. They talked
about the kinds of activity they were seeing and how the big picture of the war looked from each of their perspectives. “It wasn’t
like they sat me down, turned on the fire hose, and showed me
everything that was going on, boom boom boom. They gave me a
chance to run my mouth based on my view of everything. And
in those early days, I didn’t have it right.” By the time Mike got
back on the plane, he was all-­in. He started lobbying his bosses
in the intelligence chain of command. Sully had won another ally
for his coalition, and one who could potentially convince a whole
new group of Army officers.
As Mike worked the American chain of command, Sully
worked the British. Without explicit approval from them, Sully’s
Green Berets wouldn’t be allowed to do anything, much less a
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large-­scale siege. The British assigned a sergeant major from
the Royal Marines to embed into Sully’s unit. The two are best
friends to this day. “He told me on Day One, ‘You know I’m
here to spy on you, right? I’m here to tell the British chain of
command everything that you’re doing so nothing comes as a
surprise.’” Sully told him that that wasn’t a problem: welcome
to the team.
Sully set the sergeant major up with a computer and a desk,
and made sure that he was a part of every plan and operation.
That got the Brit’s attention—­he’d expected to be shoved into
a corner and ignored. Sully also sent an American soldier to
the British general’s headquarters, so there’d be direct lines of
communication between both camps every day. There’d also be
greater familiarity with how each team worked.
“We got a little lucky, too,” Sully admits. The British general had been a special operator himself, even though he now
commanded a brigade of reserve infantry troops. “He had a love
for special operators. We made sure that we played into that.”
Eventually they won the general over, but his staff still resisted.
“So we had to work through that. It took a lot of relationship-­
building and learning what their fears were. They had a bunch
of rough-­and-­tumble American special forces guys come rolling
in and say, ‘We’re gonna kick the hornet’s nest and it’s gonna be
great. Don’t worry about it.’” The British officers were understandably concerned about what they’d need to do after special
forces left, as they’d be responsible for the area over the long
haul. Getting the general’s staff excited about the mission once
again meant reviewing the intelligence in a way that was catered
to their particular needs and highlighted both the strengths and
From Pie in the Sky to History (Coalition-­Building)
93
weaknesses of the plan. “If we couldn’t explain why this was going
to be better for them in the long run, why would they say yes?”
All of this planning also needed to align with the interests of local Afghans. For years, coalition forces had addressed
the Taliban-­supported narcotics trade by destroying poppy and
opium crops. That strategy also destroyed the livelihoods of local
farmers. As you can imagine, many of them turned against the
Afghan government and coalition troops. The poppy eradication policy wasn’t effective at curtailing the Taliban’s operations:
farmers would just replant the next year and take their chances.
Farmers even sought protection from the Taliban to ensure that
their crops would make it to harvest and the market.6 “Eradication [of the poppy crop] is a waste of money,” said Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. “It
might destroy some acreage, but it didn’t reduce the amount of
money the Taliban got by one dollar. It just helped the Taliban.”7
Sully’s coalition-­building benefited from the relationships
that he’d built with local leaders. To attack Marjah with the greatest chance of both short-­and long-­term success, they’d conduct
the operation after harvest season, so farmers could get paid and
not suffer financially. “I had to do a lot of relationship-­building
with Afghan political leadership that we knew may have had ties
to what was gonna happen. They weren’t gonna be happy. But
again, it was built on relationships and understanding that with
everything we did, we were as open as we could be, and explained
the importance of it for the safety and security of the province.”
Sully’s coalition eventually grew to include the most important people in the chain of command. The operation would go
forward. In the operation’s final planning and rehearsal meeting,
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a Green Beret assistant team leader raised his hand. “Okay, let
me get this straight, boss,” he said. “Your plan is to fly all of us
into an area where there’s no way out, there’s no way for people
to come in and get us, we will allow ourselves to be surrounded
by hundreds of Taliban for over three days, and then we have
to get back to the exact spot where the helicopters dropped us
off?” he asked. “And this is what we’re doing? We’re all on board
for this?”
Sully looked him square in the face. “Yep, unless you have a
better plan.”
“No,” the Green Beret said. “I just wanted to be the guy
who asked. So whether this goes great or goes bad, when the history gets written, I’ll be the guy that at least asked the question.”
Sully had whipped the votes and the operation went forward. “When the flight chief asked, ‘Are we really doing this?
This is crazy. This is a suicide mission,’ I knew that he had 100
percent trust and confidence in the plan. I knew that everyone
who boarded those helicopters for the fight did.” For a mission
as dangerous as Marjah, even the people most excited to fight
needed a lot of persuading. “Usually when you tell a Green Beret
that you want to go do some crazy thing, they’re going to say,
‘Absolutely!’ But we’re talking about a lot of smart individuals
that understand how you calculate risk, especially when lives are
on the line. Everybody, every single one of those guys, had to
buy in, or that thing was not going to be a successful operation.
It took some time and a lot of effort, but I think it was based on
the fact that we all understood that this was what it was gonna
take.” His team was joined by other elite fighters: members
of the Navy SEALs, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s
From Pie in the Sky to History (Coalition-­Building)
95
special enforcement team, and several units of Afghan special
operations and police would all participate. With every single
helicopter in Afghanistan that was equipped to do the job, they
went into Marjah in late May.
It was an overwhelming victory. The operators seized
300,000 pounds of poppy seed and 39,000 pounds of raw
opium—­
a haul worth millions to the Taliban’s insurgency
funding—­along with weapons and explosives.8
For Sully, the operation succeeded because it was built on
steady ground: strong relationships and an activated coalition. It
had gone from a farfetched idea to a fully realized victory against
a Taliban stronghold only because it had won supporters with
different roles, nationalities, and levels of authority all along the
way. “The one time I’ve had a big failure in my career happened
because I started listening more to myself and not to the people
around me. I didn’t buy into the idea that I had to maintain relationships up and out, and understand what people are thinking.
Even if I know that I’m right, you just can’t blunt-­force-­object
that through.” Humility is a potent reminder of the importance
of relationships. “Not everybody sees things as clearly as you do.
If you don’t take the time to build bridges, build a network of
understanding and trust and confidence in what you’re seeing,
you’re gonna fail.”
You’re probably not a special operations commander, and
the decisions in your life might not obviously spare or cost lives.
That doesn’t mean that the lessons from Marjah don’t apply to
your relationships. Sully’s story illustrates a general principle
in especially dramatic terms: seemingly preposterous solutions
to intractable problems can work when they’re supported by
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coalitions. If you don’t see the coalition, you have to build one
yourself, finding people one by one and slowly convincing them
that your vision works for their needs.
Sometimes you simply won’t get what you want. It’s not hard
to imagine a situation in which Sully couldn’t win over the British,
regardless of how hard he tried. But he did try, and he found allies
from every angle of the assault on Marjah. He didn’t call in favors
or rely on old buddies. He built specific, relevant relationships
from scratch and nurtured them throughout operation planning.
The impossible became possible, and then it became history.
One Big Lesson
Coalition-­building isn’t just a more efficient way to get
things done—­it’s a way to turn pipe dreams into plans.
Courting allies opens up a world of possibilities that would
otherwise be laughable.
There Could Be a Better Way If They Bought In
After Minneapolis police officers murdered George Floyd
on May 25, 2020, organizations rushed to make statements
of support for racial justice, criminal justice reform, and the
Black Lives Matter movement. As protests around the country
attracted enormous attendance from broad swaths of American
society, even many staid corporations felt pressured to explicitly say something. Although messages ranged from advocacy for
the abolition of police to vanilla proclamations denouncing hate,
virtually all prominent people and institutions had something to
put on the record.
From Pie in the Sky to History (Coalition-­Building)
97
That wasn’t true for CrossFit, a fitness program with more
than 13,000 affiliated gyms around the world.9 Each year, CrossFit holds the CrossFit Games, a televised showcase of the best
athletes in the sport. It’s a prime marketing opportunity for all
kinds of fitness brands, who outfit the competitors and sponsor the event. They know that they’ll have a captive audience of
CrossFit devotees in the United States and abroad. It’s also a crucial recruiting event for CrossFit. Just as kids get inspired to play
sports when they watch the Olympics, people catch a glimpse of
mega-­athletes competing in the CrossFit Games and decide to
sign up for a workout at their local gym.
As protests for racial justice swept America, though, the
leadership of CrossFit decided to march in a very different direction. CrossFit stayed mum on the news until the company’s sole
owner and CEO, Greg Glassman, decided to tweet.
On June 7, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation
tweeted that “racism is a public health issue.” Glassman quickly
responded: “It’s FLOYD-­19.”10 He followed that up with a tweet
that questioned pandemic lockdown policy and further trivialized Floyd’s killing. Earlier that day, Glassman had held a Zoom
call with CrossFit affiliates and gone on a series of bizarre, racist rants. When a gym owner in Minneapolis asked why CrossFit hadn’t issued a statement on Floyd’s killing, Glassman said,
“We’re not mourning for George Floyd—­I don’t think me or
any of my staff are. Can you tell me why I should mourn for
him? Other than that it’s the white thing to do—­other than that,
give me another reason.” He then offered an absurd conspiracy
theory to explain the murder.11
In interviews with gym owners, the journalist Gabby Landsverk found widespread disdain for Glassman that predated the
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Floyd killing. Patrick Horsman, a gym owner in Nova Scotia,
told Landsverk that “deep down, a lot of us already saw this coming. And for many of us, [dropping CrossFit] was a decision we
had already made and not yet acted on. I believe his comments
were racist, and an indicator of a much deeper issue. But if you
believe it’s racist or not, doesn’t matter, it’s the lack of consideration as a leader in this community and a pattern of behavior that
won’t change.”12
Enter Chandler Smith and Noah Ohlsen, two of the top
contenders for the 2020 CrossFit Games. As news about Glassman broke and affiliated gyms began to sever ties with the CrossFit brand, athletes considered how they could use their platforms
to improve both the country and CrossFit. Chandler had joined
the fateful Zoom call with Glassman at the invitation of a couple of Black gym owners. As a Black man himself, Chandler had
already had a handful of racially problematic exchanges with
Glassman. “That was incident number five,” Chandler says. “If
we’re going three strikes, five is pretty excessive. I’d had four
interactions with Greg Glassman before that weekend that were
in some way racially insensitive. So I knew that I didn’t approve
of this guy, but he was the sole owner of CrossFit and ran a very
tight ship. It was always going to be the Greg Glassman Show
and no one ever saw any way to resist.”13 In addition to Glassman’s history of racist comments, he’d harassed women in and
around CrossFit for years, according to a long exposé by Katherine Rosman in The New York Times.14 When Chandler says that
there wasn’t a good way to push back on Glassman, he wasn’t
hyperbolizing. Glassman was famously litigious, and even told
one interviewer that with lawsuits, “it’s not the journey that matters, it’s the dragging.”15
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99
Noah and Chandler started talking about what they could
do as some of the sport’s most visible athletes. Noah had heard
that Katrín Davíðsdóttir, a two-­time CrossFit Game champion,
would soon announce that she’d boycott the 2020 Games. Noah
and Chandler had each been talking to their friends about joining the boycott. Noah asked if Chandler wanted to boycott
together. “Noah had sponsors, I had people on my end who
were going to be very radically disappointed. Noah was the
reigning Second Fittest Man on Earth, so he’d made a great
deal of money at the Games,” Chandler says. “I was in position
to hopefully do pretty well at the Games, too. We were potentially forfeiting a ton of money for funding, a ton of opportunities for promo and press from outside organizations.” It wasn’t
purely about consequences for their pocketbooks and careers,
though. It was also two extremely competitive athletes giving
up one of the few chances they’d have to compete at the very
highest level during the prime of their careers. “All the things
that you normally end up with as a reward for your work within
any athletic pursuit, whether it’s the ability to provide for your
family or trophies or recognition or just the ability to compete,
we were gonna give all that away and not know what was going
to happen afterwards, because we both just really strongly felt
that it was the right thing.”
Noah says that Davíðsdóttir’s action led the way. “Prior to
seeing her speak up, I was a little bit nervous,” Noah says. “I
think everybody was uncomfortable, but just sitting with it for a
while thinking, ‘I’m not sure what to do with this information.’
I felt like I needed to do something, but Katrín speaking up was
the catalyst for me to say, ‘Okay, she’s doing it. I can do it, too.’
She made a safe space.”16
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When he and Chandler got to the end of their conversation, they had decided to join Davíðsdóttir. But they knew right
away that their boycott would be much more effective if they
assembled a larger group. “We made a couple quick calls for
due diligence,” Noah says. “I called my Nike rep and said, ‘I
just want to let you know out of respect that Chandler and I are
going to make this decision, and we’re going to make it public.’
They were great about that. They said, ‘We support you no
matter what.’”
Chandler was still on Army active duty and competing
in CrossFit through his assignment to the Army Warrior Fitness Team. He not only had to answer to the military, but also
comply with federal laws prohibiting members of the armed
forces from expressing political beliefs on duty. His conversations with Army officials didn’t go nearly as smoothly as Noah’s
call to Nike had. “I had to be thoughtful, because I was going
to give up this opportunity that they had helped me get—­and
do that without asking for permission, because I didn’t feel like
you needed permission to do the right thing,” Chandler says. “I
should never have to ask permission, because even more than
all the intersectionalities that were at odds with participating
and supporting Glassman, just as a human and as someone
who’s learned everything that I have through the Army and
beforehand, nothing has ever taught me to go out of your way
to support something that you don’t believe in and disagree
with ethically.”
At 7:00 p.m. sharp on June 7, Chandler and Noah posted
identical images to their Instagram accounts: a succinct
“I’m out.” in bold white text set against a black background.
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101
Chandler’s caption included a call for others to join the
coalition:
This decision puts me in a very vulnerable position with both
work and my desired future career as a @CrossFitGames athlete.
However, I do not believe choosing to avoid participation in this
years event is a violation of duties: to my job, to the sport, or to
my ethics. It is my hope that others join me in applying pressure
to HQ in order to improve the organization we love and make it
better going forward.17
They had no idea what would happen next, but at least
they had a small coalition. Thirty minutes later, Kristi Eramo
announced that she’d boycott, too. Then Travis Mayer, another
friend of Chandler and Noah, joined in. “It was four [athletes
joining the boycott] in the first six hours,” Chandler says. “We
were thinking, ‘Great, this is gonna take over. Everybody’s gonna
be into it.’ And then it just came to a halt.”
That weekend, they competed in what they assumed would
be their last event of the year. With the Games boycott and most
events canceled for the pandemic, there weren’t many opportunities to compete, and even fewer to convince people face-­to-­face
to skip the Games. “We were talking with folks in pretty much
every segment related to the sport,” Chandler says. “We talked to
athletes, we talked to coaches, we talked to people within CrossFit, and tried to explain our position and even tried to get more
athletes. But across the board, nobody wanted to take the step.”
Glassman’s situation continued to deteriorate. Although the
boycott was still small, affiliated gyms ended their relationships
with CrossFit after Glassman’s racist remarks, and reporting from
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The New York Times, Men’s Health, and other prominent outlets
revealed the depth and breadth of Glassman’s toxicity. ­Affiliated
gyms, sponsors, and groups around CrossFit started pulling
their support for the organization. Reebok, the title sponsor of
the CrossFit Games on a deal worth roughly $10 million each
year,18 announced that they wouldn’t renew their contract when
it expired in a few months.19 “Noah and I were the first athletes,
but not the first among the whole ecosphere of CrossFit,” Chandler says. Glassman stepped down as CEO of CrossFit two days
after his tweets, but remained the sole owner of the company. No
one was convinced that Glassman relinquishing the CEO title
would change anything about the organization.
Then the boycott got great news. A new event came on to
the calendar, giving athletes another chance to compete and make
money while still protesting the CrossFit Games. As soon as
athletes learned that there would be another 2020 event, the
movement accelerated. Within a week, 35 of the 60 athletes
invited to the Games had announced that they’d boycott, and
another 13 had privately decided not to participate. Eighty percent of the athletes previously scheduled to appear at the Games
wouldn’t be there, and CrossFit would have to make material
changes for them to reconsider.
For Chandler and Noah, an overwhelming boycott was
integral to accomplishing anything. Comments alone weren’t
enough. “Things fade. Words especially fade. If everybody had just
expressed a bit of distaste and that was it, a week later everybody
would have forgotten about it. But now it was decision-­dependent:
we are not participating in the Games until something happens,”
Noah says. “It left the ball in [CrossFit’s] court to where they
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103
now needed to make another decision. It couldn’t just fade away,
because then we would have been out for good and the Games
would look way different than they should. Action takes it that
one step further so that it’s not as easy to just slowly fizzle out.”
As he talked to people in CrossFit, Chandler shared his
personal perspective as a successful Black athlete. “I said, ‘Hey, I
know you’ve seen the end result. But here’s what went into that
decision. This is some of the stuff that you maybe aren’t aware of
that’s going on within fitness or within African-­American culture
or with me personally. I just want you to know where I’m coming from.’” Walking skeptical athletes through his own thought
process made them more sympathetic to the cause and gradually
swayed some to join the boycott. “When they heard the whole
story, they understood a little bit more. And then they decided,
‘Okay, I’m out for these reasons.’ There were subsequent sexual
harassment and workplace allegations, which brought more people over, and then some folks who just hadn’t understood that
there could be a better way if they bought in.”
Conversation by conversation and athlete by athlete, the
boycott picked up speed. Building the coalition to force CrossFit’s
hand reminded Chandler of his experience in politics. “Those
conversations were happening every day. As a political science
major at school, I’ve worked for campaigns on both sides and
volunteered growing up. It felt very much like that with every
day saying that I’m going to call this person or I’m talking to this
group or we’re tracking who’s in and who’s out.” Noah says that
the experience was almost dizzying. “The conversations during
that period of time were nonstop. There were group phone calls
with all the athletes, and then there were phone calls with affiliate
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owners, and then there were phone calls with event owners, and
then a combination of the two.”
Getting more people involved compounded recruiting
efforts. Not only was it less intimidating to join a bigger boycott, but the widening coalition brought attention to different
problems and needs. “It opened the door for other people to
share their experiences as well,” Chandler says. “That revealed
that the problems were endemic, and that made the movement
more open for people’s sympathy. It wasn’t one individual’s
gripe.” Over and over, Chandler heard some version of a common revelation: “Wow, I had a similar experience, I was just too
afraid to talk. We’ve all been too afraid to speak.” Noah noticed
the phenomenon too. “As we had these individual conversations
with other athletes, they were saying, ‘The reason I haven’t made
the decision is because I don’t know if it’s really gonna do anything. Are they really going to change just because we step out?’
Eventually they realized that it was gonna be heavy enough that
[CrossFit] had to make a decision about our demands.”
Just as Sully’s coalition tipped the scale toward action in
Marjah, the CrossFit coalition became unavoidably powerful.
Within a week of the boycott reaching 80 percent of the Games’
athletes, Glassman cracked. He sold CrossFit outright.20 Glassman no longer had any formal ties or influence over the organization he’d founded 20 years before.
As Chandler noted, he, Noah, and the other athletes weren’t
solely responsible for making change happen in CrossFit—­the
actions of gym owners and commercial partners were also critical. But it’s hard to imagine such a rapid and dramatic ouster
if the athletes had all decided to participate in the Games as if
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nothing had happened. CrossFit likely could have weathered a
downturn in fees from affiliated gyms and found new sponsors.
They couldn’t have replaced their most popular athletes and pretended that everything was hunky-­dory.
For high-­level athletes with large followings, it’s easy to
tweet and forget. Statements can be courageous and productive,
particularly when they articulate unpopular views. But publishing a statement on social media is rarely enough to force real
changes. The CrossFit athletes could have posted Instagram pictures and gone on with their itineraries, but the choice to build a
rock-­solid coalition and use it to change policy transformed their
idea from performance to substance. By building relationships
and creating their coalition one conversation at a time, they tangibly improved CrossFit for athletes, corporate employees, gym
owners, and the thousands of everyday people who love their
CrossFit workouts.
One Big Lesson
Social media activism is just a start. Putting prominence
and popularity to work by forming diverse, motivated
­coalitions makes actual change happen.
Leaders Create Coalitions
We focused on two stories in this chapter. With Michael Sullivan, Chandler Smith, and Noah Ohlsen, we saw how pie-­in-­
the-­
sky goals became reality as motivated leaders assembled
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coalitions. Although they used a range of tools to recruit allies,
all three leaders primarily relied on persuading people to join
them one by one. Candid conversation got them to the finish
line. We often hear about coalitions in the context of politics and
scenarios in which diverse interests find common ground. While
that’s an important part of coalition-­building, it’s critical to highlight how those diverse interests find each other in the first place,
and what directs them to focus on the ground they share rather
than what they disagree about. Leaders conceive of and assemble
coalitions. Patient and mission-­driven people do the slow work of
pulling people together and keeping them bound as they work
toward ambitious change.
Takeaways
• Coalition-­building combines diverse interests into a
single group that can advocate for change. Coalitions
don’t create themselves, though: leaders create them one
person (and one conversation) at a time.
• Vibrant coalitions aren’t just useful in politics. They’re
often the only way to take an ambitious, improbable plan
and put it into action.
• Although coalitions require common ground among
their members, they also require strong relationships to
come into being and stay together over time.
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107
Questions for Reflection
• Do you have ambitious ideas that are stuck in gridlock?
How might recruiting allies to a coalition help you take
action on those ideas?
• How might sharing your perspective on an issue help
other people join your cause? Who might see themselves
and their interests in part of your story?
• What might you do to bolster your confidence when
making a risky request of someone else?
CHAPTER
6
The Long and Winding
Road (Loyalty)
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O
f all the themes we explore in this book, loyalty is probably
the most heraldic. It’s the one that looks most at home on
a crest or in some grand motto—­maybe even a coat of arms. It’s
also unfortunately easy to warp into all kinds of cynical shapes.
If loyalty can be the glue that holds us together, it can also be
bastardized to trap people in dysfunctional, frustrating, or even
abusive situations, all in the supposed name of fidelity.
We’re interested in loyalty principally between people.
(That should hardly come as a surprise by this point.) You can
certainly be loyal to an idea, an organization, or maybe even a
physical thing, but that’s not our focus. As two people strengthen
their relationship, they develop greater loyalty toward each other.
After experiencing first-­hand how transformative acts of loyalty
can be, people often move forward with a significantly greater
desire to foster new relationships and find mutual loyalty in all
corners of their lives.
This is a dynamic that we’ve seen over and over throughout
the book: a positive, substantive relationship doesn’t just benefit
the two people involved. It inspires the creation of more relationships and more acts of character. As you read the three stories in
this chapter, pay attention to the idea of paying things forward.
Loyalty compounds when people don’t just pay favors back, but
also decide to pass the loyalty that they were shown onward.
Sometimes, It’s Pay It Forward
“No matter how big the organization is, I’m going to take the
time for people,” Joyce Jelks says.1 She’s the head of people
and culture at Wieden+Kennedy, an advertising agency with
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enormous clients from Nike and Ford to Kraft and Impossible
Foods. Before joining the firm, Joyce held senior leadership roles
at several of the top sports organizations in the New York area,
including the Brooklyn Nets, New Jersey Devils, New York City
FC, and Excel Sports Management. She’s responsible for people
in some of the fastest-­moving organizations in marketing and
athletics.
For Joyce, devoting time to relationships goes way back.
She’s the oldest of five siblings. Growing up in Ohio, she
attended private school thanks to the generosity of her grandmother. When her grandmother retired from a career with the
US Postal Service, they decided that Joyce would start going to
public high school.
“I was lost at a public school,” Joyce says. “It was very different. I didn’t have a lot of structure. I didn’t really know when to
apply to college, to be honest. So when junior year, senior year
came around, people were getting into school and I just thought,
‘How do you get into school?’ I had no clue.” In her senior year,
two military recruiters came to one of her marketing classes.
They mentioned that the Army would pay for college. “Oh, that
sounds great,” Joyce thought. That was her way into higher education. The next day, she contacted the recruiters and said that
she was ready to enlist. Her parents signed a waiver that allowed
her to join the Army at 17 years old. “That summer while folks
were partying, I went to boot camp seven days after graduation.”
Joyce finished boot camp and returned home as a member of the
Army Reserve.
Joyce’s father then helped her enroll at the University of
Toledo. She thought she wanted to be a high school history
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teacher—­and, like so many college students, discovered a different calling. She switched to business and her grades started
rising. Her guidance counselor mentioned that if she kept her
academic performance up, she could graduate with honors. That
lit another fire for Joyce. “There have been all these times in life
where I didn’t know, and I just listened to people,” she says.
Joyce used the same listen-­and-­adjust mentality in her military education. She’d begun to distinguish herself in the Reserve
and was one of the fastest runners in her unit. Her battalion
commander suggested that she look into the Reserve Officers’
Training Corps (often just called ROTC), since she was already
a college student. She did, and soon after signed a contract to
join. “I was finally finding my footing,” she says. A week later,
her Reserve unit got notice that they would deploy overseas. Her
ROTC officers said otherwise. She’d joined ROTC, so she’d stay
at school instead.
Joyce was excelling in the classroom and in ROTC. She was
also excelling in the physical parts of her military training. She’d
built strong relationships with both her classmates and the officers who ran the program. That October, she and her ROTC peers
took a physical training test and Joyce ran one of the fastest times
of her life. Immediately after the test, though, she fell very ill.
“This is crazy,” she remembers thinking. “I just feel . . . so weird.”
After a few days out of commission, Joyce figured it out. She
was pregnant. That wasn’t good news for her future in the Army,
and it certainly wouldn’t make college any easier, either.
The next day, she found her ROTC officer after class and
gave him the news. “I think he saw it in my face,” she says. “He
asked me a bunch of standard questions and mulled it over. And
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then he asked me, ‘Do you want to continue this?’” Joyce was
shocked. “I’d thought I was getting kicked out of this program. I
thought I may not even be able to continue as a Reservist.”
Shortly after, the head of the program came to talk with
Joyce. It was official: she could stay and take the time she needed
to have her child. Joyce continued the rest of her routine in the
meantime, from academic coursework to ROTC leadership labs.
Her mentors delayed her training camp requirements. They
wanted to make sure that she’d be back for the fall semester.
“I didn’t want to let them down. I was working out as soon
as I had Jalen. Maybe three or four weeks after having him, I was
trying to lift, trying to do whatever. When I took the PT [physical training] test, I smoked it. They were like, ‘Okay, really? She’s
back.’” Joyce scored a 290 out of 300—­nearly perfect, and miles
above the required standard. She wasn’t just back: she was performing at an almost surreal level for anyone, let alone someone
who’d just given birth. That further cemented the loyalty that
leaders in the program felt for Joyce, and that she felt for them.
“During that time, [my ROTC officers] were amazing. I
was able to take Jalen to leadership labs when I couldn’t find
a babysitter, and they let me do everything I needed to do as a
new mom.” She eventually went to training camp, got her branch
assignment of choice, and thrived with her new son in tow. “I
always told them, ‘Thank you so much for just having faith in me
in a time when I didn’t think I could do it.’ I had no kid supplies
when I had Jalen. I was 21 at the time.” Her captain at Toledo
was done having kids of his own and gave Joyce all of the baby
supplies left over from his family. Her fellow cadets stepped up,
too, giving her their extra gear from camp.
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“When Jalen was born, I had so many amazing advocates. As
you can tell from my story, I had a lot of time with no structure in
my life, but I always had somebody to give advice and help. And
they saw that I listened, so I wasn’t a lost cause.”
Had it not been for that loyalty and social support, Joyce’s
life could easily have veered in a different direction. It would
have been easy for an ROTC officer to throw a pregnant cadet
out of the program, and most probably would have. The faith to
do otherwise is something Joyce still thinks about now that she’s
in a leadership role. Although her days in Toledo are gone, she
can still practice the lessons that she learned there. “Not everything’s give and take,” she says. “Sometimes it’s pay it forward.
And with everything in HR, I have that in my mind. How do you
make the biggest impact and touch the most amount of people
possible? I never forget about ‘Don’t pay it back, pay it forward.’
I tell my interns that, and I tell my direct reports that.”
The experiences she had with patient, loyal mentors as a
young mother in college still inflect her bearing toward people
who come to her needing help. “I learned to give people time and
take the conversation. No matter where I go, I’m going to take
the conversation.” When we spoke with her, Joyce had just counseled a man who was trying to transition into the sports industry.
He had a family and lived in the Southwest, but was moving to
New York to start a brand-­new career. Joyce agreed to take a
phone call with him, but she knew by the end of the conversation
that he could use a lot more help. She decided that this wouldn’t
just be a one-­off call. She asked for his resume and then rewrote
it for him. Shortly afterward, they met for coffee to check on
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how his job search was going. Taking on mentees has become a
big part of Joyce’s life, and something that she values about her
role and her company. Whereas some companies insist on narrow job descriptions and nonstop meetings, she has the ability to
engage with people outside the firm who could use her help, just
as people went out of their way to support her in college.
“At each of these points in my life, people saw something in
me. They gave me a piece of advice that they didn’t have to give,
and they helped me see it through. These are just good people.
They helped me be resilient because thanks to that advice, I saw
a way through a time that was really, really tough. And I had no
guidance except for these nuggets from different folks.”
Joyce’s story showcases just how powerful loyalty can be
both over long periods of time and across wide swaths of people.
In the short term, the loyalty and support of ROTC officers and
peers allowed her to stay in the program and better confront the
challenges of becoming a parent. She returned that loyalty by
doing everything she could to return and succeed in the program
after Jalen’s birth. But loyalty also created a web of compounding
benefits, thanks to the approach of paying things forward. There
are many people in the sports industry and beyond who’ve indirectly benefited from the kindness and decency shown to Joyce
back in Toledo. Those initial acts of loyalty not only addressed
the difficulties of her pregnancy, but also helped shape Joyce
into a person who wants to use that same approach now that the
tables have turned. In the parlance of twenty-­first-­century business, relationships might not scale, but acts of character often
multiply exponentially.
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One Big Lesson
Acts of loyalty pull people together and provide mutual
support. They also inspire future generosity and loyalty
toward others.
You Don’t Want to Drop the Ball
Co-­author Mike’s own story depends on the strength of loyalty.
At 30, he found himself in graduate school at the University of
Michigan. He’d just returned from his second deployment to the
Middle East, where he’d worked on critical intelligence for the
coalition effort in Afghanistan, including the siege on Marjah.2
Now he found himself in the comparatively placid environment
of academia, with younger peers whose interests had little in
common with his. His Army orders required him to earn a degree
and then join the faculty of West Point. As Mike had to abruptly
readjust to stateside life, he noticed plenty of veterans who could
use some help reacclimating to civilian life, too. He knew first-­
hand that physical activity could help re-­engage veterans with
communities and peers; it could also improve their mental and
physical health and give them a new sense of purpose. The idea
for Team Red, White & Blue was born.3
Although the idea was sound, there was an obvious problem: Mike wasn’t an experienced nonprofit leader. He had exactly
zero experience leading a nonprofit. However helpful his Army
experience and academic studies were for the substance of Team
RWB, they shed no light on the numerous legal, organizational,
and bureaucratic requirements for establishing an organization.
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That’s where Mike’s relationships came in. New 501(c)(3)
organizations have to submit a list of personnel to the IRS. Mike
had to find a vice president, treasurer, and board of directors,
but he wasn’t exactly working with Silicon Valley funding. He’d
have to fill out his initial team with people who believed in the
mission, trusted him, and would be willing to give their time and
energy on faith. He couldn’t just cold-­call prominent veterans.
He had to lean on the people he’d built relationships with.
“First of all, I talked to my wife. I said, ‘I have no idea what
we’re doing here, but will you be on the board?’”
“Sure,” she said. One down: Genevieve Erwin would be vice
president.4
Then came phone calls to trusted people who Mike suspected would say yes. He called Jimmy McBride, a West Point
classmate who’d also been in the same unit as Mike for the past
three years. “He’d never been on a board before. Much like me,
he didn’t know what a board of directors was. But he said that
he liked what I was trying to do, and he trusted me.” Mike knew
that McBride owned two rental properties. Perfect. He’d be the
treasurer. “No MBA, no knowledge about any of this stuff, but
you’ve got two rental properties plus your house, so you must be
good with money,” Mike said. In the early days, Mike would scan
checks and paperwork and email them to McBride, who would
manually enter the information in an Excel sheet and send each
donor a letter with a receipt of their donation to use for taxes.
That was the kind of tedium Mike was recruiting people for, and
they happily got on board. “It was just amazing to see the sheer
volume of mundane work that people put into the organization,”
Mike says.
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Genevieve said that her best friend was exceptionally detail-­
oriented and would make a great secretary. “So that’s how we got
the four names for the IRS paperwork,” Mike says. He wasn’t
playing favorites and handing out cushy opportunities to old
buddies. He was hoping that people would give themselves to a
nascent cause entirely because they felt loyalty to him.
“The key when we were getting the organization off the
ground was that I knew them all, and I trusted them all. They
trusted me, too,” Mike says. “I made an ask of them to join the
board, even though none of us knew what it really meant to be
on a board of directors for a nonprofit organization. It wasn’t
blind; they knew I wasn’t saying to go jump off a cliff. They said,
‘Hey, you’re trying to build an organization. I’ll help you out.’”
With a board of directors assembled, Team RWB now had
to put programs together and find people to involve in their mission of enriching veterans’ lives. Once again, that meant calling on existing relationships with people around the country. “I
started sharing the organization and the desire to help veterans
with everybody I knew. I did some of that via social media, but
mostly I did it on email and text messages and I called a lot of
people. I just picked up the phone and called them.”
That first group of supporters also grew from the power of
loyalty built over years, if not decades. Chris Widell was a key
player in Team RWB’s expansion into the Houston area. Widell
didn’t just agree to help out: he organized Veterans Day 5k and
10k races and made sure that veterans all over East Texas knew
about them. He and Mike had gone to college together and
taken a few of the same classes, but they weren’t especially close.
Widell’s father died during their senior year; when he heard the
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119
news, Mike swung by Widell’s room to share his condolences and
check in on how things were going. Nearly 10 years later, as Mike
called on his relationships to make the dream of Team RWB real,
Widell vividly recalled that brief moment they shared after his
father’s passing. He told Mike that when he got the email asking to be a part of the just-­started Team RWB, he agreed to join
because of that conversation in the dorms. Mike was the kind
of person who would go out of his way to check in during a difficult time, and Widell wanted to work with that kind of person.
“It’s the little power of actions that we take,” Mike says. “I wasn’t
his leader back then. We were peers, classmates. But it was the
power of humanity, and the power of knowing that someone’s
going through a hard time. As busy as you are, it’s really important not to forget that when people are going through adversity,
a computer or AI software is not going to do it. It’s not going to
make a difference for them. They need other human beings in
their life.”
Mike kept finding that people who were living through hard
times were especially inclined to raise their hands and volunteer.
Blaine Smith, who later became the organization’s first executive director, was experiencing the difficulty of transitioning back
to domestic life after a particularly hard deployment earlier that
year. “I don’t know what this is, but yes, I’ll get this going in
Tampa,” Smith told Mike.
“None of us really knew what this was,” Mike remembers.
“It was just committing to reaching out to local VA centers
and asking if there were veterans who were struggling. So even
though there was a lack of clarity on what Team RWB was at
that time, people just kept on saying yes.” They were inspired by
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the mission and all of them had strong ties to military life. But
there are plenty of veterans’ organizations, and in 2009, nearly all
of them were better funded, more organized, and more mature
than the fledgling Team RWB. They said yes to this particular
effort because of their longstanding loyalty to Mike. “It wasn’t
just about the mission. It was about the people and the loyalty
they felt toward people they knew, and people they were starting
to know better.”
Some local Team RWB chapters started without a link to
Mike, but the vast majority were direct results of relationships.
In the first few years of the organization, “a lot of people got
involved because of loyalty to me as a friend,” Mike says. “Not
only did they get involved, but they didn’t want to let me down
once they got involved. The power of loyalty is how it encourages you to bring your best self forward because you want to
make the other person in the relationship proud. You don’t want
to drop the ball for them.”
Just as it did for Joyce, loyalty in Team RWB started spreading
beyond the relationships that tied those first few people together.
Relationships started opening new doors all over the organization in a way that probably wouldn’t have happened in a group
founded on deep pockets and corporate policies. Team RWB had
a scrappy, can-­do ethos that people wanted to join. “There are
relationships with people who help you open doors,” Mike says.
“They say, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing here. Let me help
you. Let me open this door and introduce you to somebody who
can help you out.’” Mike’s longtime friend Matt Caldwell introduced him to a top law firm, who provided pro bono counsel to
Team RWB—­and has continued to do so ever since.
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Loyalty begets more relationships and connects otherwise
disparate people. You might call this “networking,” but that’s a
bit too crude of a term for what’s happening. Think of all the
people you know and what you’d be willing to do for them.
Surely there’s a spectrum—­you’d do more for your partner or
best friend than for a casual acquaintance at work. Introducing a
stranger to someone you know is risky. Without knowing the new
person, it’s impossible to predict what they’ll ask of whomever
you introduce them to. The ostensibly easy favor of connecting two people can become an embarrassing faux pas for you. As
we build loyalty, though, this dynamic changes. Connecting the
people in our lives stops being a potential threat to our reputation and becomes a powerful amplifier for both ourselves and all
the people around us. This domino effect—­another variation on
Joyce’s idea of paying it forward—­was exactly how Team RWB
got its logo. Mike’s friend Dena Braeger, who’d suggested that he
do his graduate work at Michigan, connected him with a marketing executive in the publishing industry, who connected Team
RWB with Rule29, the agency that designed the eagle logo that
represents the organization to this day.
That loyalty creates these connections and helps get things
done doesn’t mean that we ought to live our lives perpetually
angling for the next favor from someone else. Not only is that a
thoroughly cynical way to live, it’s also counterproductive. Anyone can tell when you’re acting in the interest of a transaction
rather than a relationship. We all know a skeezy social climber
who feigns friendship for the sole purpose of getting something
from us. At best, that’s quid pro quo. Crucial to the story of
loyalty—­and to its role in the founding of Team RWB—­is how it
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has to be built over time, and well before you have a request for
the other person. Mike’s consoling Chris Widell during college
wasn’t a down payment on some future favor, just as the ROTC
officers at Toledo didn’t expect some dollar-­for-­dollar repayment
from Joyce Jelks.
You build relationships and the loyalty that accompanies
them over time in the course of being a stand-­up person and
leader. When those people can help you or when you can help
them, those years of loyalty compel action. It’s unlikely that the
ledger will ever balance out to fifty-­fifty, and barring manipulative
behavior, even keeping track of that ledger is beside the point. We
should build loyalty because of how it ties us to the people around
us, and expect no tangible benefits in return. If and when we can
call on that loyalty in times of need, that’s a wonderful bonus.
Long-­term loyalty made this book happen. Mike and Willys
met in September 2012 at the first McDonald Conference for
Leaders of Character, which was founded by Bob McDonald.
(Remember his story from Chapter 4.) Mike and Willys stayed
in touch after the conference and built a strong relationship
over more than nine years. One result? The book you’re reading
right now.
In Mike’s view, starting anything from scratch means leaning on relationships—­unless you’re starting with a war chest.
“Maybe you’ve got millions of dollars, or you’ve built a successful first company and now you want to build a second. If money’s
not a hurdle for you, that’s different. Very, very few of us are in
that situation. Any time you want to start something, no matter
how amazing it is, you’re not going to get it done without that
capital if you don’t have people.”
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Even for groups that do have lots of money, it’s nearly
impossible to replace the motivation and empathy that loyalty
provides. The hypercapitalized and digital world will always
throw us fresh distractions, newly minted shining objects to
attract our gaze and pull us away from whatever we’re doing.
Loyalty combats that allurement by reminding us that we live
in relation to others and have duties to them, distractions be
damned. In doing so, loyalty helps create stability in otherwise
chaotic environments. (We’ll explore the value of stability more
in the next chapter.)
“Any time someone reaches out and asks me to do something, I want to say yes as often as I possibly can,” Mike says. “I
don’t just blindly say it, and it’s not because I’m thinking of when
I might need to turn to that person. But when you live your life
that way, it turns out that people end up doing things for you.
They do things for you that you didn’t even know you needed.
That’s the loyalty you build over time through your interactions
with people.”
Loyalty came back around for Mike and Team RWB. After
getting things started, Mike left the role of executive director
in 2013. In 2016, he left his role as chair of the board of directors, too. His focus shifted to other projects, including his role in
starting the Positivity Project and bringing it to schools around
the country. Three years later, it was Team RWB calling Mike for
a favor. The group had hit an inflection point and needed him
back full-­time. The Erwin family had just moved and welcomed
a new child, and Mike had a full plate of other work. Still, it only
made sense for things to come full circle. He said yes, and once
again became executive director of Team RWB in 2019.
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One Big Lesson
Loyalty grows over long stretches of time. We can’t rush
to build loyalty in hope of cashing it in.
Dreams 4 All
Locally owned small businesses offer fertile ground for loyalty
in a business world that increasingly sees people as expendable.
Keith Moneymaker grew up in the family business, hanging out
in his dad’s store and helping after school. When he graduated
college, Keith took over. At the tender age of 21, he was in charge
of Sweet Dreams Mattresses & More in a small town in central
North Carolina.
His first few years at the helm were by his own admission
full of stress, disorganization, and immaturity. “The company
was growing even though I may not have taken it 100 percent
seriously,” Keith says. “I was going through with what I’d promised, but that came at the sacrifice of people that worked for me.
I threw it all on their backs.”5 People would get urgent calls to
make deliveries on Sundays or shift their schedules to get something done on short notice. Keith had seen his parents work for
themselves and run businesses, so he thought that he and his very
small staff could handle whatever needed to be done, whenever
it needed to be done. He was concerned about the national chain
Mattress Firm running his store out of business, so he decided
to do everything possible to be competitive, including being
open seven days a week. He didn’t want to be there every day,
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though. His burden, and the burden for all of his employees,
kept growing.
Keith’s best friend worked for him. They’d hung out in
the back of the store playing video games as teenagers and now
worked together full-­time as adults. After one especially chaotic
weekend of last-­minute drives to pick up inventory, Keith got a
letter from his friend. “Quit making work suck worse than it has
to. Quit needing so much from so few,” part of it read. “Try promoting a healthy work environment instead of playing Dictator
Tycoon.” At the end, Keith’s best friend quit the job, and said he
didn’t want to hear from Keith in any way again. “So that obviously cut pretty deep,” Keith says. “We’d been friends for more
than 12 years at that point. I tried to reach out once or twice
shortly after that, but I’ve yet to talk to him to this day.” Their
silence has now lasted for eight years.
That schism was just one part of a big shift in Keith’s life.
He had recently gotten engaged and realized that he needed to
spend more of his time and energy on his relationship. With the
letter from his best friend, he’d now gotten a dramatic wake-­up
call about another important relationship. Not only could he run
his business better, but he should treat people better, too.
One observation about the mattress business helped turn
everything around. “For every mattress store across the United
States, when you deliver a bed, you get an old bed back 90 percent of the time. That’s just how it works. If you have an old
car and you trade it in to get a new car, they have places for old cars
to go. The dump seems to be the only place for old mattresses—­
and I was getting a lot of nice beds.” Every so often, a family
would come in looking for a mattress at a price lower than what
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Keith or any other mattress store could offer. He started giving
those families the perfectly good, just-­sanitized used beds that
he had in the back for free. “It never really occurred to me to do
anything more with it. I just did it once in a while to be nice and
help somebody else.”
That changed in late 2016, when Hurricane Matthew hit
southeastern North Carolina. Twenty-­
eight people died and
weeks of extreme flooding ruined homes and property throughout the area.6 Keith heard that more than 600 families were living in high schools and churches. One of his friends had traveled
to Lumberton, a town in the middle of the storm’s path, to help
rebuild people’s houses. He shared a video of the scene: entire
streets had towering stacks of ruined furniture on the curb outside each home. “And on top of every pile was a bed,” Keith says.
He posted on Facebook that if you’d lost your bed in the storm,
you should shoot him a message. He’d bring you a mattress. Not
long after, he was headed south with 300 refurbished mattresses
to distribute for free.
The effort escalated from there. More and more people
reached out to Keith for help, whether they were leaving an abusive husband or had just lost everything in a house fire. He even
started donating mattresses to underfunded fire departments.
“I had no organization. I just threw mattresses in my pickup
truck.” What began as a simple act of compassion started changing the company’s relationship with their community. The staff
at Sweet Dreams weren’t just moving units—­they were increasingly involved in providing dignity and comfort to people who
needed help. “Everybody saw extreme value in that, because now
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they were part of something. They were helping somebody get
off the floor. So now the company had actual purpose and a philanthropic standpoint.” As the mattress donations grew, the effort
became a full-­fledged 501(c)(3) organization: the Dreams 4 All
Foundation.
As the team did more and more good for others, they started
noticing all kinds of other benefits. They felt a deeper purpose in
their work and increasing loyalty not only to each other, but also
to the people whose lives they improved through the foundation’s
work. They also became more firmly rooted in the towns they
served. Learning from his failure to treat his best friend properly, Keith saw opportunities to build loyalty with people across
all walks of life. “If you’re not investing in the town where you
expect people to support your business and spend their money,
it’s not going to be a long-­term success. If you open up in a town,
do something for that community. Support a local baseball team.
Don’t just open up and expect that town to support you.”
He also learned that empowering his team and winning
their loyalty allowed all of them to spend more time on important big-­picture projects, like expanding Dreams 4 All. When
people get treated and paid well at work, they tend to stay
longer, work better, and free up time for projects they believe
in. “It may cost you a little more, but it relieves your time to go
do that extra work in the community and quit thinking about
the day-­
to-­
day grind,” Keith says. Empowered people find
new solutions to old problems. “There’s a training manual [at
Sweet Dreams] that outlines everything while still giving people autonomy and empowerment. Every individual is allowed
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to be unique. Everybody has their own thing that they take and
fly with.” Keith believes that more leaders should take a similar
approach. “I think people can free up more time if they’re willing
to give up just a little control. You can’t have a loyal employee
unless you’re trusting them. And they can see you trust them
by the responsibilities that you give them.” More trust begets
more loyalty, which in turn begets even more trust. It’s a self-­
perpetuating cycle of relationship-­building.
The loyalty that Keith and his team show toward their area
has come back to them, too. After Dreams 4 All got going, the
hometown newspaper featured their work multiple times.7 Ever
since then, they’ve had a devout following and lots of new business at Sweet Dreams, including customers from much farther
away than they’d been used to. “After someone buys a mattress,
when we ask them how they heard about us, 99 percent of the
time they say, ‘We know what you do with the old beds.’ They
don’t even bargain. They just come in and pay the price and support the company—­because in turn, the company is supporting
Dreams 4 All.” Keith’s investment in treating people right continues to pay dividends for his bottom line, too. “I’ve found a
resource, and I don’t know why nobody else has tapped into it.
I’m not doing it for the profit, but my business has been increasing for the past four years, steadily every single month, due to the
goodwill and good nature of what we’re doing. The more beds
we sell, the more we get back . . . and the more we give away. It’s
a beautiful cycle.”
Although Keith’s motivation for the foundation isn’t financial, the business benefits make it easier to continue and even
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expand his charitable work, including taking Dreams 4 All to a
national scale. Once again, it’s a virtuous cycle. That’s something
that national megabrands can’t match, and it’s a collective good
for all kinds of people in Moore County, North Carolina.
One Big Lesson
Loyalty to an idea or community can often create loyalty
among people. As we find people who share our allegiances, we tend to create meaningful, lasting, and loyal
relationships with them.
Takeaways
• Loyalty is a long game. It only works when we commit
to other people without an expectation of material gain,
and continue to nurture that faithfulness over years.
• Like so many other benefits of relationships, loyalty isn’t
just about two people. It often swells beyond an individual relationship to include other people or even entire
communities.
• Sometimes being loyal to someone means serving some-
one else entirely. In cases where we can’t directly pay
back a favor, we can still honor that loyalty by paying
it forward.
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Questions for Reflection
• How did acts of loyalty shape your early life? How might
you be able to pay forward those gifts from others?
• Which of your long-­standing relationships could use
some attention? Which might you be able to resuscitate
with a phone call or some quality time?
• How might you jump-­start loyalty by doing something
for someone else? What value can you bring to that
­person’s life, even if it’s unsolicited?
CHAPTER
7
Stable Ground
(Stability)
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I
f you read enough anxious news headlines, it’s easy to start
thinking that stability is a relic of the mid-­century American boom. From politics to the labor market, there’s incessant
hand-­wringing about how constancy has given way to an always-­
changing, always-­in-­turmoil new normal. We all know that the
days of employees staying with a firm from their first days out of
school until retirement are long gone—­at least two generations
gone. At the beginning of 2020, the average American worker
had been with their current employer for 4.1 years.1 Contrary to
headlines, though, it’s not clear that young people are job-­hopping
all that much more than their parents did. From the 1980s until
now, the average American has taken about the same number of
jobs between their teenage years and their mid-­thirties.2
There’s still good reason to suspect that turnover could
accelerate, and that’s not just because of stereotypes associated
with Millennials and Gen Zers. As more of corporate America
jettisons the job-­
for-­
life model, companies increasingly want
“flexible workforces:” full-­
time employee positions become
independent contractor gigs, and workers lose health benefits,
retirement funds, and many employment protections. Laws like
Proposition 22 in California also ensure that gig economy corporations like Uber, Lyft, and Doordash don’t have to classify
the vast majority of their workers as employees, which further
untethers people from long-­
term financial and employment
security.3 For many people born after 1980 or so—­whose early
careers have coincided with 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, the
Covid-­
19 pandemic, or all three—­
it’s obvious that employment is tenuous, and you always need to scout for your next gig.
Your only security is your ability to find a new job. So much for
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133
any meaningful sense of stability, whether you’re a worker, an
organization, or anyone living in this kind of catch-­as-­catch-­can
environment.
Some industries have tried to create more stable environments by offering carnivalesque “perks.” Sprawling university-­
like campuses, free restaurant-­
quality food, and ping-­
pong
tables in the office all supposedly work to retain tech firms’ best
employees, even if a competitor comes knocking with a lucrative job offer. It’s not clear how much any of that accomplishes.
For one thing, money talks. Not many people will turn down a
big raise to hang around some nice office amenities. (Let’s be
real: a 20 percent raise can buy a whole lot of delicious lunches.)
Beyond compensation, it is clear from workplace research that
people care about the quality of their experiences at work. They
just care less about material perks than the flashiest campuses of
Silicon Valley might lead you to believe.
One project from the patron saint of flashy workplaces,
Google, suggests that the most stable and high-­functioning teams
promote “psychological safety,” a term coined by the leadership
scholar Dr. Amy Edmondson in the late 1990s.4 In psychologically safe environments, team members feel confident articulating their thoughts because they know that they won’t be shot
down or judged by their peers.5 While that safety relies on group
norms, it also relies on relationships within the group. As Charles
Duhigg notes in his magazine feature on Google’s research, “The
paradox, of course, is that Google’s intense data collection and
number crunching have led it to the same conclusions that good
managers have always known. In the best teams, members listen
to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.”6
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Great leaders won’t be able to keep every star member of
their team. There will always be other attractive workplaces and a
laundry list of life circumstances that pull key contributors away.
But investing in relationships can create more stable organizations, and ones that don’t suffer from the jarring attrition that
uncaring teams do. When we spoke to the psychology researcher
and human resources executive Sesil Pir, she stressed the importance of stability for moving quickly in the digital world. “A lot of
organizations are looking to innovate and become more agile, but
stability is the foundation for agility,” Sesil says. “People cannot
be flexible unless they know that there is that baseline they can
stand on, and a stable ground. You only pick up flexibility after
stability, and then comes speed. That’s how you build agility.”7
As important as turnover is in many organizations, stability isn’t only about keeping people from jumping ship. It’s also
about creating a culture and giving people a healthy environment in which to grow. In the stories that follow, three leaders
illustrate how relationship-­based leadership can stabilize chaotic
situations. One has held leadership roles in famously intense tech
companies; another created a family of children from all over the
world and a business to help others do the same; the third led a
remarkably stable and future-­looking school district through the
most significant upheaval to education in at least a century. Let’s
start there, with Clarence Garner.
You’re Going to Celebrate the Organization
Clarence Garner spent 36 years working in Grand Blanc schools.
Just outside of Flint and about an hour’s drive northwest of
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135
Detroit, Grand Blanc is the largest school district in the county
and the home of the second-­largest high school in Michigan.
Clarence grew up one town north of Grand Blanc, went to college in Flint, got his master’s degree from a university an hour
south, and started his career as a student teacher in Grand Blanc.
When we talked to him, he was serving his fifth year as superintendent and preparing to retire. As the district website proudly
claims, he’s a “hometown boy” through and through.8
After more than 30 years of service, Clarence got the promotion to superintendent. He’d reached the top spot in the
school district he’d dedicated his life to. His boss, the president
of the school board, started him off with an unexpected task: pick
a successor. “It’s a weird thing. You’re sitting down and getting
ready to sign your first contract as a superintendent and your
boss says, ‘Oh and by the way, when you go to hire your deputy,
your job is to hire your successor.’” It wasn’t the celebration you
might expect upon landing the organization’s top job. “That’s a
moment where you go, ‘Gosh, shouldn’t we be celebrating me?
I’m the superintendent!’ But the board president is telling you,
‘No, you’re going to celebrate the organization. You’re going to
grow the organization.’”9
The board hadn’t selected Clarence as an interim leader or
bridge to someone else. They simply expected their leader to act
as a custodian of the district’s long-­term future. That meant starting to assemble the next leadership team right away. He chose a
deputy, Trevor Alward, who soon got the exact same request.
“I told Trevor that he was to identify five to 10 individuals in our organization that he believed could be leaders moving
forward, either in administrative positions, personnel director
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positions, or central office positions,” Clarence says. Succession
planning all the way down the org chart solidified the district
in case anyone suddenly left or fell ill. But that wasn’t the only
reason to insist on planning for the future. “Trevor’s job was then
to identify those individuals and to coach, mentor, and provide
professional development for them. So they’re not only invested
in your organization, but they see their own future leadership
in the organization.” That approach also allows leaders to have
straightforward conversations about what they need to do to
continue developing. “This came well before me,” Clarence says.
“When you’re brought up in the Grand Blanc system, as soon as
you get hired, your job is to develop, grow, coach, and mentor
your replacement.”
Grand Blanc’s emphasis on leadership planning doesn’t
appear in any guidebook for administrators. It’s simply the culture that the district has cultivated for decades and insists on for
younger generations of leaders. Recruiting the right people and
evaluating their work is part of this strategy. Just as important is
the role of explicit and valued succession planning. By making
clear statements about the district’s culture and selecting leaders who practice those behaviors every day, Grand Blanc puts
its money where its mouth is. As teachers and staff members see
which of their peers get selected for future leadership opportunities, they see more and more reinforcement of what matters
to Grand Blanc. Clarence told us about one teacher who’d pick
up little pieces of paper left on the floor of the hallway as he
walked through the school. That was the kind of behavior Grand
Blanc cherished and sought to instill in up-­and-­coming leaders.
“That seems so trite. It’s such a little thing. But it showed us that
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he believed he was no better than the custodian,” Clarence says.
“When you see that in individuals, you know that others will say,
‘I want to emulate that. I want to follow that individual.’”
That culture gets passed down primarily through relationships. A recently hired superintendent in a nearby town asked
Clarence what he should focus on to be successful in the job. The
first things that came to Clarence’s mind? Meet with the mayor
once a month, meet with the police chief, meet with a committee of parents, meet with the district’s principals. “It didn’t have
to do with the business of education. It had to do with relationships—­it was all about relationships.”
Grand Blanc’s stability helped it weather the storm of
Covid-­19. After closing schools in March 2020, Grand Blanc
prepared to reopen in-­person instruction in the fall. Some kids
would stay in their remote Virtual Academy, but many would
return to physical school each day.
One August evening on his porch, Clarence just didn’t feel
right about reopening. He took another look at the data for
Grand Blanc. The rate of positive Covid-­19 tests in its county
concerned him—­so did the number of Grand Blanc teachers
out sick with potential Covid infections. Some logistical figures
looked dire: the district’s pool of substitute teachers, which would
typically range from 400 to 500 people, was down to 23. Clarence needed at least 90 custodians to clean the schools each day,
but only 70 were available to work. That coming Monday, he and
the president of the school board would present their reopening plan to the entire community. That wasn’t looking possible.
Clarence didn’t think he had enough staff to operate the schools,
let alone keep everyone in the community safe.
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“I knew this would hurt,” he says. One group that Clarence
relied on to make decisions was his Superintendent’s Advisory
Committee, a group of about 20 parents that he meets with each
month. They were torn on returning to in-­person teaching. One
member of the group, though, convinced Clarence that reopening the schools for the beginning of the year would be a mistake.
He was a Black father and pastor in the area, and he told Clarence about a pastoral convention that he and his peers attend
each year in Detroit. He started listing all of the convention
attendees who’d died of Covid in the past six months. More than
20 people had passed away just from that group.
“That led me to go back to our data,” Clarence says. Twenty
percent of Grand Blanc residents are Black, and the overwhelming
majority of those children wouldn’t be coming back to in-­person
instruction if it resumed. “They had lost so many family members
due to Covid. As I looked at our school district from a holistic
standpoint, that’s a large part of our population that was negatively
impacted and continue to be negatively impacted,” Clarence says.10
Looking back now, Covid had killed Black Americans at twice the
rate of whites by October 2020, and Latino Americans, Indigenous Americans, and Pacific Islander Americans were all dying
from Covid at significantly higher rates than white Americans.11
After sharing his view with his leadership team and winning their support, Clarence had to announce the decision to
stay remote. Eight hundred people from the community joined
the video meeting.
“In 30-­plus years, the anger that came out of that. . . The
meeting lasted six hours. We had about 50 public comments.
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139
People threatened to kill me afterward. They wanted to meet me
in the parking lot and physically harm me because of what I’d
done, but I knew that it was the right decision at that moment.”
Clarence had anticipated frustration, disappointment, and anger.
But the furor still surprised him.
What happened next speaks to the benefits of a stable,
community-­
rooted organization. The messages Clarence and
his staff received took an about-­face. “About a week after [the
announcement], we started getting communication from people
we had never heard from before. Families were saying, ‘I can’t
imagine being in that moment having to make a decision like
that. You did it, and we applaud you for that. We do appreciate
you looking at the safety and the security of our kids and our
families.’” The town rallied around improving remote education.
Together, they fortified systems to keep kids learning and families safe. “We had a huge outpouring, from the mayor to the chief
of police, applauding the school district at a time when the easy
decision would have been to bring [students] back and figure it
out.” The commitment to making remote learning work forced
the district to adopt technological changes that otherwise would
have taken years. “It’s forced us to look at things like people who
do not have internet access and food security,” Clarence says.
Grand Blanc held food pickup drives and delivered internet hot
spots to families that needed them. Those were problems that
were easier to ignore when kids were coming to the building
each day. “So even in the moment where you feel like you’re
drowning in this pandemic, to me, we are actually better today
than we were prepandemic.”
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Clarence is quick to say that remote education still has plenty
of drawbacks. “Do we need to get back to face-­to-­face? Yes, but
we’ve learned from the pandemic that if we have to switch in the
future, or we have students who are sick or can’t attend for whatever reason, we can now deliver good-­quality, curriculum-­rich
education to them remotely.”
What stands out about Grand Blanc is how remarkably
committed it is to maintaining a stable culture that’s always basing decisions on five-­year, 10-­year, and decades-­long horizons.
That mentality has helped it retain young leaders, train them,
and promote them into executive leadership as people who cherish the entire Grand Blanc community. This isn’t a band of ambitious mercenaries, ready to jump to another district as soon as a
job offer comes through. They’re dedicated to their town. That
stability and investment makes controversial decisions, like the
choice to stick with remote learning, possible. Community members were able to voice their views during the decision-making
process, inflect Clarence’s thinking, and affect the direction of
their town. And, despite the initial outcry, it also created the conditions for a community-­wide rally to make remote education as
effective as possible for everyone.
One Big Lesson
Relationships don’t just encourage people to stay in a
situation, job, or community. They also create a level of
stability that nurtures growth for both individuals and the
culture of the group.
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141
Love Is a Verb
For Leia Capps, stability isn’t about turnover statistics or maintaining an organizational culture. It’s about providing purpose,
peace, and calm for her family. On paper, the lives of Leia and her
husband Taylor read like chaos. Taylor is a career Army officer:
the Capps are an active-­duty military family with more than 60
total months of deployment under their belts. They also fill a
12-­passenger van with eight children.
Leia and Taylor have largely lived in separate cities and even
separate continents. “I often joke that the pace our family keeps
when I’m home is so taxing that I need to deploy for a break,” he
says. “If Army life is anything, it is chaotic and uncertain. Raising eight children—­three biological and five chosen through
adoption—­takes certainty and throws it to the wind. The combination of [the Army and parenting] has made life unpredictable and has taken Leia to challenging places.”12 But inside their
half-­renovated home, with boxes of business inventory stashed in
corners and children that span from toddlers to teenagers, what
should be turmoil is calm. Taylor attributes that to the leadership
of the person he pursued ever since she tore apart his love letter
in third grade. For Leia, leadership doesn’t have to include a title,
and stability isn’t about control. She says that leadership has been
about “making a space where things feel predictable and safe,
even in the face of the most uncertain circumstances.”
Leia and Taylor decided to start their family through adoption. Although they planned to adopt just once, a trip to a Vietnam orphanage quickly changed that. “We couldn’t ignore the
scarcity and desperation of orphanage life, and the contrast that
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it had with the abundant life we were living,” Leia says. “We
knew in that moment that the resources we had at our fingertips
were profoundly powerful. They could change lives, and they
weren’t just meant to make our lives comfortable. We couldn’t
unsee what we had seen and there was no going back. We knew
we would adopt again.”
Adopt again they did. Five of their eight children were born
outside the United States. Regardless of whether they joined the
family by birth or adoption, all eight children were immediately
thrown into military life and have endured countless deployments, training activities, and extended separations from the
father who’s committed to both them and the military.
Stability can be a potent force in any group, but it’s especially important in the raising of children. As Taylor’s military
career flourished, unpredictable demands multiplied Leia’s challenges. That was never clearer than when Taylor got an eight-­
month deployment and Leia and the children moved back to
her native California to be near family. “Eight months turned
into three years of living apart,” Leia says. “We couldn’t seem to
catch a break from the deployments and training events that prevented us from living together as an intact family. We faced one
false summit after another.” Despite those disappointments, solo
parenting, and time apart, Leia continued to grow their family
through adoption.
While her husband was deployed overseas, she also traveled
to other continents and transitioned emotionally and medically
fragile children out of orphanages and into their home. When
life felt chaotic, Taylor says that Leia brought stability to stormy
circumstances. “Leia doesn’t give chaos a seat at the table,” he
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143
says. “She learns from it, but never invites it to stay and thrive in
her home.”
After those three years of long-­distance marriage, Leia and
her children moved to North Carolina and prepared for what
they thought would be the end of living apart. “The last time
we’d lived together, we had two children,” Leia says. “Now we
had four—­almost five, because I was nine months pregnant. We
had children that my husband was getting reacquainted with and
a baby on the way, and we were so excited to finally be a family.”
But just a few days after the move, the family got another surprise
from the Army: Taylor needed to deploy overseas again. He came
home from his first day at work to a house full of unpacked boxes
and children with the stomach flu. He had to give his very pregnant wife the bad news. “It was crushing for our family,” Leia says.
“Not only were we going to be separated again, but I also needed
to figure out how to deliver a baby and transition four kids into
their new life without a husband or a local support network.
“That’s when I decided that I could drown or I could dig in,
forge new relationships, and figure it out.” The new baby arrived
the same week as a skin cancer surgery for Leia, a post-­cancer
eye patch, and Taylor’s departure for another long deployment.
“Even though everything felt out of control, our family just
thrived because we decided we would do just that,” Leia says.
She reached out to this new town and started finding people who
she could lean on, even if they were just getting to know each
other. She started a fitness group and created relationships with
women in town over shared workouts. “I was rocking the eye
patch, we were going to birthday parties . . . and we all had to go
everywhere together.”
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At one point shortly after the move, their newly adopted son
became unresponsive. With her husband deployed, Leia called
911. In the back of the ambulance, she sent Taylor a simple email
about what was going on. When he read it from continents away,
he immediately called her. “That email should have been a phone
call!” he joked. She laughed as she ran between the emergency
room and the waiting room to nurse their newest baby. “What
would you have done from the other side of the world?” she
responded.
Stability in those moments of uncertainty came not only
from Leia’s ability to set a calm tone, but also from the individual
relationships that their children forged during trying times. “Our
kids have gotten to experience life as a full spectrum because
my husband was gone so frequently and, without extended family to rely on, the kids often had to sacrifice fun for practical.”
The entire family embraces the daunting and complex together.
Leia says that they live by a simple motto: “Love is a verb.” They
believe that love should express itself through action, and that
this brand of love builds deep bonds and lasting trust.
Throughout this book, we’ve tried to stress the presence
of leadership in all of life’s pursuits, whether “leader” is part of
a formal title or not. Mindful, loving parenthood is clearly an
important form of leadership. Although Leia’s experience is an
especially dramatic example of parental leadership, you don’t
need to parent eight children to serve others at home. Engaged
parents are leaders every day.
With a full medical docket, a full home, and an empty bank
account, Leia and Taylor knew that orphan care shouldn’t end
with their last adoption. They knew that they might no longer
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be able to adopt, but they still had more to give. That’s when
they started a jerky company. From 2016 to 2020, when the
pandemic shuttered their shop, Sage Harvest Gourmet Jerky
funded 17 surgeries, provided 12 adoption grants, and contributed more than $140,000 to orphan care. Their next project? An
apparel company.
One Big Lesson
Love shared between people is a powerful stabilizing force.
Our relationships ground us in our commitments to each
other, even as our circumstances become uncertain or
quickly change.
Could I Get Fired for This?
For Sean Kelley, being a leader and a human being at the same
time isn’t complicated. Just before Sean left his last role, the
company’s talent management leaders called him in for a meeting. They said that he was anomalously good at retaining top-­
performing employees. What was he doing so well? “Employees
are humans,” Sean told them. He laughs retelling the story now.13
For more than 20 years, Sean built teams at some of the
world’s largest and most influential tech companies. From 1999
to 2015, he led operations and recruiting teams at Microsoft,
working in areas from cloud and enterprise software recruiting
to company-­wide diversity and inclusion initiatives. Next up was
the other behemoth of the Seattle tech scene: Amazon. Before he
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left the company in 2020, he led the Worldwide Operations Talent Acquisition team, which found and recruited candidates for
a huge variety of Amazon’s departments. When he started in the
role, he led a team of about 240 people. After doubling the size of
the team nearly every year over the course of his tenure, he left
as the leader of an 1,100-­person organization.
Sean joined the firm a few months after a New York Times
investigation revealed a workplace culture at Amazon that routinely ran employees into the ground. Journalists Jodi Kantor
and David Streitfeld found multiple Amazon employees who’d
been marginalized in the company during and after cancer treatments, and an overall expectation of demands incommensurate
with human limits. One former Amazon employee described the
emotional grinder of working at Amazon: “Nearly every person
I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”14 When Sean took the
job, the company’s prevailing culture hit him right away. “You
could feel the human toll of the pace of growth immediately. I
had people crying in my office and I didn’t see leaders around
me speaking out that things needed to change,” Sean says. “The
company had a mechanical approach to talent, knowing that if
one person leaves, there are plenty of people to replace them.
They were truly ‘head count,’ lines on a spreadsheet.”
He needed to lead with intentionality in that environment.
“I was very open when I was hired about how I lead, and I felt
compelled to reinforce a people-­first approach in everything I
touched at the company. I needed to figure out how to emphasize the idea that you can lead authentically as a leader of purpose
who has a heart, and not feel like you’re going to get fired every
day for doing that. Plus, I knew from experience that this would
lead to exceptional results.”
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From Day One, Sean’s job looked just like the Times article. To refocus the culture on his team, he had to make changes
right away. “I had to just stabilize them. I had to fire a couple of
managers who I thought were really bad humans. I had to tell
them that we were never going to see eye-­to-­eye on how to lead
people. I think with leaders who lead with their heart and kindness, people underestimate that you sometimes have to do that
kind of stuff.”
Within months of his starting, the team could tell that Sean
was serious about practicing what he preached. Firing abusive
employees started giving the rest of his people reason to believe
that things would improve. “They all knew that those people
were mean and disrespectful and a whole bunch of other things.
So they all sat up when those people didn’t come to staff meeting
for the first time. I told them that there’s a way that we’re going
to lead together. I’m going to show up and do my part. I just need
you to lean in with me.”
The biggest threat to his team’s stability and well-­being was
abundantly clear: the company culture was relentlessly focused
on growth, and at times lost sight of the human cost of that
growth. Sean had to keep bringing a people-­first approach to his
daily work in an environment that was often outwardly critical
of a compassionate approach. “The culture was so hard-­charging
that people didn’t know how to ask for help or raise their hands
and say, ‘I can’t push this hard.’” As a leader, Sean thought of his
job as freeing people to use their existing strengths and beliefs.
“It was about giving people permission to just be the great people
they already were.” Shifting his team’s culture as it exponentially
grew meant doing a lot of little things: taking time to have genuine conversations at the coffee machine, asking people about
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their lives, and not conducting work as if bottom-­line metrics
were the only things in the universe that mattered.
Early in his tenure at Amazon, Sean heard a knock on
his office door. A member of his team walked in, shaking and
with tears in his eyes. A high-­up executive had just sent him an
urgent question about a role they were hiring for. It was nerve-­
wracking to receive a question from such a prominent official.
This recruiter thought—­maybe even knew—­that he was about to
lose his job. “What are we going to do?” he asked Sean.
Sean invited him into the office, asked him to sit down, and
assured him that he wasn’t going to get fired. Together, they’d take
some breaths, calm down, and reassess the situation. Sean didn’t
actually know what was going on behind the scenes. “Could I get
fired for this? Maybe. I have no idea. I’m new here,” he thought.
Sean went to his boss and got the lowdown. The email was a
big deal, but there was a process to deal with it. They’d research
what had happened, explain it clearly, and get an answer back to
executives within 24 hours. They did. The recruiter wasn’t fired,
and life moved on.
By the time Sean announced that he would leave Amazon
four years later, that same recruiter had become a manager. He
sent Sean a note. Not only had he thought that he’d be fired
during that incident, but he thought he’d be fired during his first
conversation with Sean. Years later, he just wanted to thank Sean
again for being calm, helping to defuse the situation, and treating him with dignity during a frightening time in his career. “I
showed that to my boss because it told me how much we underestimated being calm under pressure and just being decent,”
Sean says. “Being nice. I didn’t need to freak out that guy, but
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he’d obviously been conditioned to be freaked out. My job was
to come in and just take things down a notch. It actually gave
him faith in the company, not just me. That simple interaction
with decency, respect, and kindness changed his entire view of
the company and his career.”
The job couldn’t be done exclusively through individual
conversations, though: there were still structural problems that
Sean had to fix for his team to both be successful and feel a little less like the walls were closing in on them every day. That’s
been true at multiple stops in Sean’s career, and it’s always meant
persuading executives to care more about people. Employees are
humans, after all, and not just lines on a spreadsheet.
When Sean took over the cloud recruiting team at Microsoft, he realized that the team was only half-­staffed. They’d have
to double the size of the team to achieve their goals, or else burn
everyone out—­and probably still not hit their targets. Years earlier in his first weeks at the company, a senior executive had cut
Sean off during a conversation about the people on his team.
They were going through a business review, and as a matter of
principle Sean had always started those meetings with an overview of people metrics. He believed that people were “the engine,
the only true differentiator to deliver operational results.”
“Why the f**k are we talking about people?” the executive
asked. That had left quite the impression. Sean nearly left the
company, but decided to stay and lead his way. Now, with a new
team and a different slate of executives, Sean decided to be bold.
Satya Nadella, who’s now the CEO of Microsoft, ran the cloud
and enterprise business at the time. Sean joined Nadella’s executive staff meeting and prepared a single slide. It simply stated
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that his team would be more successful if it invested more in
relationships, and showed some basic math about how to make
that happen. They’d need permission to hire 20 more people.
“I can still see the CFO’s jaw hitting the floor,” Sean says. “I
could practically hear him saying, ‘Do not make that ask.’” Sean
explained that there was no path to winning as things stood. His
team could recruit half as many new employees as the company
needed, or they could hire 20 new recruiters and fulfill the entire
goal—­one that was crucial to the team’s ambition of becoming
the fastest business to reach $1 billion in Microsoft’s history. “It
was just truth-­telling for the operational side. It’s an organization
design question based on taking care of the team as the means
to deliver outstanding results.” He wasn’t going to delusionally
require his team to achieve impossible results, and he wasn’t willing to deal with the human consequences of acting that way.
“I say that the lights dimmed and everyone else disappeared.
[Nadella] and I started floating,” Sean jokes. “This is a tête-­à-­tête
with one of the smartest people in tech! He looked at me, and I
had never met this man. He just started riffing.”
“So you’ll hire contractors for these roles,” Nadella said.
“Would you hire contractors for the top engineering roles
in the company?” Sean asked.
Nadella shook his head.
“So no, I won’t hire temp recruiters for these roles either,
because we won’t win. I need the best recruiters on the planet to
win for you.”
The two stared at each other for a minute.
“Do it,” Nadella said.
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Sean went back to his team. They were all sure that they’d
seen the last of him. “You’re going to get fired today,” one of
them had said before the staff meeting. Of course, that’s not how
the fated tête-­à-­tête had gone. The team would have to keep
working hard, but they’d get the staffing to do it properly.
A similar story played out at Amazon. It’s a dynamic that
leaders from all kinds of organizations can relate to. “When I
first got there,” Sean says, “the team told me that nobody wanted
to come work in this recruiting organization. There’s probably a
reason for that. It turned out that people had half the resources
that they needed, so they were getting their asses kicked every
day because something wasn’t getting delivered. Instead of figuring out why that thing didn’t get delivered, we were beating
people up about it.” Progress came slowly, but Sean shifted the
focus from beating up individuals to solving their underlying
problems. He taught leaders on his team to serve others. He built
relationships with the people on his team so that he could understand their unique motivations, dreams, and fears. People around
the company took notice. Six months after Sean started, the head
of talent acquisition for Europe operations told Sean that she
should start reporting to him. Sean had been hired to run the
North America organization—­this was a step up in his responsibilities, albeit one that didn’t come with a pay raise or new title.
The momentum just kept rolling from there. “People would
tell us, ‘I want to be a part of whatever you’re building.’ And then
we started popping up new hires from other parts of the company,” he says. “We would invite people to all-­hands meetings to
feel the culture. That was a secret sauce of mine, because I did
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stuff! I brought in a marching band. I’d have the team doing a
chant—­the metrics chant, the funnel chant, I didn’t care. Building energy and team spirit. I’m a cheerleader. They wanted me
in a costume, I’d put on a costume.” The point wasn’t to just
put on a show. It was to counteract all the toil that people had
become used to at work. If they saw a team that could perform
at a high level and seem enjoyable, they’d want to get in on it.
Existing team members would be much more likely to stay, too,
and they’d be much more likely to do their best work. “These
people have to love their jobs. They’re recruiters! They need to
love each other and they need to love their jobs. If we’ve got that,
then it’s all easy. We just point them at the phones and LinkedIn
and say, ‘Let’s do this.’ But if they hate their jobs, they can’t do it.
They can’t connect with candidates and sell this as their future.”
A year and a half into the role, Amazon employees from
other organizations wanted to transfer to Sean’s team. That told
him that the plan was working, and it raised eyebrows among his
peers across the company. They started calling to ask what he
was doing. “To me, it’s the simplest formula. What is it that tilts
me toward win? It’s human-­centric leadership and focusing on
people metrics.”
One of those people metrics offered a quick glimpse into
the health of his team’s relationships: how rejected job candidates
responded to surveys. At a large company, hundreds or thousands
of candidates compete for a single opening. Some never get past
submitting a resume, but many talk to a recruiter on the phone
or come in for on-­site interviews. The vast majority of those people don’t get a job offer. Sean gauged the health of his team on
the sentiments of those people: the ones that his team rejected.
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He regularly checked on survey results from that group. If his
team was thriving and treating people well, then even the people
they eventually rejected should still be able to say good things
about the recruiters they worked with.
“I’d find the outlier recruiters and ask them how the people
they didn’t give a job offer gave them better survey responses
than the people who did get an offer. And it was always about
offering clear communication, timeliness, empathy, respect, a
dose of dignity, and a little bit of feedback.” Treating those people well was a reflection of how the recruiter viewed other
­ eople, regardless of their immediate utility to the company.
p
“I made some assumptions, and for every interview you hold,
there are 40 people around that job candidate just waiting to
hear how the interview went. I don’t care if it’s a thumbs-­up or a
thumbs-­down for that candidate. It’s a moment to send a ripple
of good connection out into the world.” That’s one reason why
the responses from rejected candidates were so meaningful to
Sean. “If I saw that number start to dip on a team, I knew that
something was out of whack. We weren’t in a healthy place as a
team, and we weren’t taking care of our own staff. And in turn,
we weren’t sharing the love with the people that we weren’t hiring. It was a super-­simple thing.”
Plenty of other metrics speak to Sean’s success, though.
His team retained 99 percent of top performers across the
1,100-­person organization. Despite leading a team spread out
across 15 countries in North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle
East, and Asia, Sean’s group had half the attrition of the broader
HR department. All the while, they hired more than 40,000 people for teams across the company in Sean’s last full year in the
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job. They also became a global leader in hiring veterans and their
families—­a particularly meaningful accomplishment for Sean.15
Like Clarence Garner, Sean also left the organization ready
to continue its people-­first, high-­performance culture. “My boss
asked me to stick around a little bit longer to make sure that
things continued. I said, ‘Hey, the crew knows the plan. Here are
four ready successors: pick one of them. They can all run this
thing. I’ve been a nonessential player for a while now, readying
for this moment. The one thing that will make this fall apart is if
you aren’t supportive of us putting people first.”
One Big Lesson
Giving people permission to act like human beings is
possible even in highly pressurized, high-­attrition
­environments. Prioritizing relationship-­building and
decency is often the best way to counteract that kind of
culture and create healthy stability amid chaos.
Choosing to Stay
Old-­fashioned as it may sound, we’re confident that relationships are the most consistently underestimated tool for creating
and maintaining stability in an organization—­whether it’s a family, a community, a school district, or a company. Cultures that
treat people with dignity and bond their members with sincere,
meaningful relationships simply have a better chance of surviving over time and avoiding rampant turnover.
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We long for connection. When we find it, we tend to value
it immensely. There are certainly other factors that influence
stability, particularly in the workplace. Great relationships won’t
make up for shamelessly underpaying employees (nor should
they). They do, however, give leaders the best insight into what’s
working, what’s not, and which actions might effectively address
an organization’s most fundamental problems. Relationships
allow for better diagnoses and more specific solutions.
They also create an environment that people actually want
to be involved in. This sounds dead simple, and it is. People run
from situations in which they’re treated as nameless, faceless
cogs to be exploited for maximum production; they stick around
in situations in which they’re seen, heard, and cared for. Groups
that want to persist over time and retain their people need to
start with relationships. Money, perks, and a sense of purpose
all help, but they should complement a strong social and emotional network.
Takeaways
• Stability isn’t just about minimizing turnover. It’s about
creating a culture that’s calm, healthy, and productive for
the people in it—­whether they stay for life or not.
• Stable environments aren’t necessarily static ones. Even
in chaotic circumstances, relationships can give us solid
ground from which to address crazy challenges.
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Questions for Reflection
• Think of a hectic environment in your life. How might
focusing on relationships help you create a stable system
within that environment?
• How do you make your family more stable? Your group
of friends? Your community? Your workplace?
• What kind of stability is important to you? Which parts
of your life need to feel settled for you to do good work
and feel satisfied?
CHAPTER
8
Start Leading
with Relationships
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R
elationships are personal and idiosyncratic. It would be disingenuous to pretend that they should all develop in some
pat way. That said, we want to offer you a few tactics to try.
They’re hardly comprehensive, but if you’re at a loss for what to
do next, try one of these.
At the very end of the chapter, we’ll also leave you with our
parting thought: a rallying cry for putting people first in the digital world.
Draw Concentration Lines
It’s easy to let stress from one part of your life leak into others.
Work anxiety is devilishly good at sabotaging time with family
and friends, but a fraught situation at home can just as easily
wreck that blissful flow state at work. The ability to compartmentalize worry has all kinds of psychological benefits, including the
clarity to form stronger relationships. If your mind is elsewhere,
your companion will notice. It’ll be hard to have a meaningful
conversation and learn about their life and emotional landscape.
When we compartmentalize stress, we can really be with someone else, even when we have other unresolved problems.
Matt Hasselbeck offers one approach to compartmentalizing. He played quarterback in the NFL for 18 years, including a 10-­year run as the starter for the Seattle Seahawks. He
was selected to the Pro Bowl (the NFL equivalent of an all-­star
game) three times, and led the team to its first-­ever Super Bowl
appearance in 2006. Matt talks about a “concentration line”: you
draw a boundary at a physical place and require yourself to do
certain things whenever you cross the line. His head coach in
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college, Tom Coughlin, drew a concentration line around the
football field. When you stepped on the field, you had to have
your mouthpiece in your mouth, all four chinstrap buckles in
place, and your mind entirely on football. As a pro in Seattle,
Matt learned another concentration line from his quarterback
coach, Jim Zorn. Zorn drew a line at the Roanoke Tavern, a bar
between the team facility and Zorn’s home. When he crossed the
Roanoke Tavern on the commute home each night, he forced
himself to stop thinking about football and focus entirely on
his family.
That lesson proved especially valuable for Matt as a new
father and the starting quarterback of an NFL team. “Whatever
is still going on in my mind about work, about third-­down plays,
red-­zone plays, I can’t believe this writer wrote this about me, I
can’t believe this coach yelled this at me, I can’t believe the guy
next to me was hung over at practice today . . . whatever that
drama is, whatever your injuries are, this is my concentration
line,” Matt says. “And I am now preparing myself to step into that
household, not on my cell phone, not thinking about work, not
really thinking about anything except being present, just like you
would do on a football field.”1
You can draw a concentration line anywhere and use it to
divide any two portions of your life. You might experiment with
the obvious line between your workplace and home, especially
if you live with your family or roommates. But there are lots
of other spaces you might want to consider protecting with a
concentration line. Think about a weekly workout class, standing happy hour with friends, or group hobby. You won’t be perfect about keeping your focus, of course, but making a conscious
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effort to do so will help you spend more intentional time with
the people in your life.
Fess Up to Fear
We’re all scared sometimes, but admitting that can feel risky.
Vulnerability can feel especially dangerous when you’re scared
of something you can’t avoid, whether it’s a job, a family obligation, or any other inevitable challenge. Coleman Ruiz has
faced extremely scary situations over and over. After graduating
from the U.S. Naval Academy, he served as a Navy SEAL for 13
years, including six combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Those battle experiences never immunized him against fear.
“I would shake every time I got on the helicopter on any
given night,” Coleman says. “I was so terrified. I don’t think that
fear affects performance, because we have ways to work through
it and still execute the tactical part of our job. But what if five
other guys in my troop who also performed perfectly well had
the demeanor and the sensitivity that I had, and they were terrified, too? And we never talked about that?”2 Presenting yourself
as fearless is baked into the culture of the military, but doing
so glosses over valuable information about other people. It also
hides opportunities to share experiences and find solutions.
“We can do it in baby steps, and we don’t want to overshare.
But I want to ask myself, ‘Am I doing my part to slowly but surely
share the entire range of who I am with the other person?’ I’m
discovering now that if I don’t do that in a relationship, I’m not
sure that we’ll ever get to other things, like real accountability
or trust.”
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Coleman mentions a scene from Stephen Pressfield’s novel
Gates of Fire in which Spartan warriors have a post-­battle “fear-­
shedding” session before the king:
Clasping their comrades by the hand, they knelt, not from reverence
alone, though that element was abundant, but because the strength
had suddenly fled from their knees, which could no longer support
them. Many wept, others shuddered violently . . . Their hands trembled so badly they could not [fix their hair]. Others would chuckle
knowingly at the sight, the veteran warriors knew better than to
try; it was impossible to make the limbs behave, and the frustrated
groomers would chuckle back, a dark laughter from hell.3
What if modern soldiers could embrace the psychological turmoil of war that openly? What if we all could so openly
address our fear and vulnerabilities? “If we were there in our
relational ability with each other,” Coleman says, “that would be
leadership by relationship.”
As we’ve explored throughout the book, vulnerability nurtures relationships. Fear is one way to express vulnerability, albeit
one that often feels especially risky. That’s exactly why it can be
especially potent. Acknowledging your fear gives others permission to admit their own, and together you can confront the fear
that reasonable people experience in terrifying circumstances.
Coleman points out that these relationships forged in
authenticity allow us to better gauge others and work together.
“If we don’t know each other, I think we jump to judgment: ‘Is
Coleman doing a good job?’ If we do know enough about each
other, what do we go to? We go to listening and help and kindness and compassion. We don’t go to, ‘You’re f**ked up, so I need
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to fire you.’” For a feeling as strong and stigmatized as fear, sharing it with others resets our collective expectations and allows us
to see others as full, complicated, alive human beings.
Mix Up Your Company
One risk of prioritizing relationships is hunkering down with
just a few trusted people who you then privilege to the detriment
of others. We enter relationships with a host of biases from our
life experience, and we tend to like people who we believe are
similar to us.4 However natural this process might be, it’s crucial to break it and form relationships with all kinds of people.
Consciously choosing to spend time with people who don’t look
or act like we do is imperative for both being better members of
community and becoming better leaders.
Matt found this throughout his playing career. “The town
I grew up in outside Boston was predominantly white, and then
my career for 18 years in the NFL was on teams predominantly
made up of guys that were Black,” he says. “In those years of being
teammates, you have conversations that are deeper and different than just a ‘what’s up?’ The locker room created an environment where I could get educated and become more empathetic.
I learned things I would never have learned if I hadn’t left my
hometown.”
Team facilities weren’t some utopia, though. Although the
teams didn’t feel segregated, tables at the team cafeteria mostly
were. “With the exception of the offensive line, who always ate
together, it would be mostly Black guys at this table and mostly
white guys at that table,” Matt says. He decided that he’d move
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from table to table, so he’d never go too long without sharing
a meal with any given teammate. “There wasn’t anything super
profound about it, but I would have missed out on so many
incredibly valuable relationships if I hadn’t done that. It would
have been super, super easy for me to just kick it with [fellow
quarterbacks] Trent Dilfer and Brock Huard, or Andrew Luck
and Chandler Harnish, or Jake Locker and Rusty Smith.”
Meals are an easy way to meet new people and get to know
them, but they’re hardly the only place for diversifying the crowd
you run with. Even taking an interest in the life of your mail carrier is an opportunity.
It’s easy to fall into talking to the same people over and
over. To broaden your perspective and treat other people better,
choose to vary the company you keep.
Use Character-­Strength Vocabulary
The academic psychologists Dr. Chris Peterson and Dr. Martin
Seligman studied the various elements that make up someone’s
character. In 2004, they published the results of that research:
Character Strengths and Virtues. The book lists 24 character
strengths that exist in varying degrees in each person, and appear
throughout a wide range of cultures and historical eras:5
• Appreciation of beauty and excellence
• Bravery
• Creativity
• Curiosity
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
• Enthusiasm
• Fairness
• Forgiveness
• Gratitude
• Humility
• Humor
• Integrity
• Kindness
• Leadership
• Love
• Love of learning
• Open-­mindedness
• Optimism
• Perseverance
• Perspective
• Prudence
• Purpose
• Self-­control
• Social intelligence
• Teamwork
Using character-­strength vocabulary means talking to and
about people in a way that emphasizes their unique strengths.
Rather than using generic compliments or thank-­yous, try highlighting how people showcase one or more of their character
Start Leading with Relationships
165
strengths. It’s the difference between “Thanks for that,” and
“Thanks for your teamwork and kindness in that tough spot.”
It’s a small language tweak but, as we saw in the chapter on trust,
one that can make people feel more valued and accelerate the
growth of a relationship. It shows that you’re paying attention to
each person’s individual personality and what they bring to your
relationship.
Balance Vulnerability and Boundaries
The past several years have brought us tremendous insight into
the value of acknowledging and displaying vulnerability—­it’s a
renaissance that’s largely due to the research and advocacy of
Dr. Brené Brown. Our culture hasn’t valued vulnerability enough,
and many of us would benefit from sharing more of ourselves with
those around us. Just as Coleman Ruiz suggests sharing fear
with others, we can share all kinds of vulnerability.
That said, there’s still a reasonable limit to the display of
vulnerability and an important role for boundary-­setting. Brown
addressed this in a podcast conversation with Dr. Adam Grant, a
prominent organizational psychologist:
What I think people are asking is, “How much is too much to
share about my feelings?” And that always leads me to this very
simple sentence: vulnerability minus boundaries is not vulnerability. Are you sharing your emotions and your experiences to move
work, connection, or a relationship forward? Or are you working
your shit out with somebody? Work is not a place to do that.6
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
Some situations still call for steely resolve, especially from
leaders. Your personality, group, and circumstances will determine what the right balance is for you, but stay attentive to how
much vulnerability you are or aren’t sharing with others. You
might need to set boundaries and dial it back—­or open up and
allow people to engage with more of you.
Ask Thoughtful Questions
The possibilities are infinite—­just try to spend a little less time
talking about the weather or what’s for lunch. Here are some
questions that have helped co-­author Mike and his colleagues at
Team Red, White & Blue:
• Where were you born? Do you have any siblings?
How many?
• What’s your best childhood memory?
• What did you want to be when you grew up?
• If you could go back to high school, what’s one thing you
would do differently?
• Which three adjectives best describe you?
• What’s the most impactful book you’ve ever read?
• What’s the best vacation you’ve ever taken?
• What are three things that you’re scared of?
• What’s your favorite movie of all time?
• What’s one thing that you’re insecure about?
• What’s your favorite quote?
• If you could craft your ideal four-­course meal, what
would it be?
Start Leading with Relationships
167
• What are three pet peeves that ruffle your feathers?
• What’s your dream job?
• How can people best show appreciation to you?
• What’s something you do that you really want to
change or stop?
• Was there a life-­changing moment in your life?
What was it?
• What are three things on your bucket list?
• What’s the greatest struggle you’ve overcome?
• Of everything you’ve done in life, what are you
most proud of?
• If someone were writing your one-­sentence biography,
what would it be?
If you’re looking for even more questions to provoke conversation, check out Dr. Gregory Stock’s The Book of Questions.7
Speak Like Words Matter—­Because They Do
We’ve explored this idea in a number of ways throughout the book.
(Remember Dr. Chaveso Cook’s communal language from Chapter 4.) Effective leaders need to stay particularly vigilant about
how their diction affects the people around them. If you’re not
constantly evaluating the words you use, you’re almost certainly
not communicating as clearly and empathetically as you could.
Again, you’ll need to evaluate your own specific scenario to
understand the best way to improve. Here’s one more tip that
applies across the board, though: replace “stop” language with
positive language. For instance, instead of chiding someone for
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
what they did wrong, articulate what they might do better from
now on. Instead of issuing a trivial “sorry for being late” when
you’re a minute or two tardy to a coffee date, try “thanks for
waiting for me” instead.
There’s a time for apologies and tough love, as we explored
in the accountability and forgiveness chapters. But too often we
use negative language for tiny infractions. Rather than dwelling
on the negative, we can explicitly appreciate the gracious behavior of others.
Use Everyday Reminders
In his leadership coaching practice, co-­author Mike uses a list
of simple steps to remind people to prioritize relationships. We
think that the list can benefit you, too:
• Communicate in person as much as possible.
• Praise in public, criticize in private.
• Donate to someone’s cause or support their business.
• Put your phone away and be present with people.
• Redirect credit to others and assume responsibility
for mistakes.
• Use the power of meals to connect.
• Manage expectations.
These points are purposefully short. Experiment with them
and learn how they’re most relevant to your life and your leadership. As you practice them, feel free to edit the list and make it
meaningful for you.
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Start Leading with Relationships
Put Your Reading into Practice
The One Big Lesson box at the end of each story and the Takeaways and Questions for Reflection at the end of each chapter
exist to help you translate the stories in this book into specific,
meaningful behavioral changes. As much as we appreciated hearing these stories as stories, we’re sure that they can also help you
mature as a leader.
Review your answers to the Questions for Reflection and
consider what you might like to do differently. You might notice
one-­off actions that you can take right away; you might notice a
broader theme that you want to address. We’re not interested in
being prescriptive—­every relationship is a vibrant cornucopia of
particular details. If you’ve read each chapter and reflected along
the way, you have the beginning of a personalized action plan in
place. Write down those thoughts, refine them a bit, and commit
to making a few small changes. We hope that the stories from
this book stick with you in both memory and behavior.
***
Toward Tomorrow
You’re reading this at a time of profound change. We live in a
world recently shaken by a shared catastrophe. The pandemic
affected every country and, in one way or another, every person.
Now we move forward in the wake of that crisis, trying to find
the principles upon which a postpandemic world should grow.
That alone is plenty to work on, but we still need to contend
with the protean challenges of a digital culture. There’s a ton we
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
just don’t know about our world and our society. How will we
reshape our societies to prevent another pandemic? How will
constant access to devices change our children’s brains? Will arti­­
ficial intelligence create a prosperous new economy, or put billions of people permanently out of work? We don’t know, and
anyone who claims to know is either lying or blissfully naive.
Our uncertainty about these fundamental questions makes
relationships all the more appealing as a path forward. Artificial
intelligence might be coming for rote technical jobs soon, but
it’s got a long way to go before it can eliminate fields rooted
in human connection, from nursing to coaching to acting. We
know plenty about our need for each other and how much we
can accomplish when we act together. We can commit to the
inherent worth of the people around us, and our belief that caring for them makes us stronger in the face of unprecedented
challenges. We also know that the alternative to strong relationships is a solitary, disconnected life—­a kind of perpetual, self-­
imposed pandemic lockdown. For people across the developed
world, the pandemic gave us a relentless and experiential lesson
in what distance from others really feels like.
When we talked to Apolo Ohno, one of the most decorated
winter Olympians of all time and now an entrepreneur and investor, he stressed how important our particular moment will be for
shaping the future of relationship-­building. “There’s something
about the relationship experience when we do things in person
that science can’t currently measure. It’s sharing a coffee or a tea
or a meal or a beer, or whatever that is, with the other human
being. You cannot get that texture and layer and depth and body
Start Leading with Relationships
171
language when you are in front of a screen.”8 You’ve certainly felt
this, whether you’re a video call aficionado or a luddite. We simply communicate better in person. That’s not, however, a call for
every job to require nine-­to-­five, Monday-­through-­Friday office
hours. From gaining access to more diverse voices to reducing
our carbon footprint, a more-­remote world offers a host of benefits. But we have to approach our relationships with intention,
energy, and desire. We can’t just assume that they’ll take care of
themselves over the course of perfunctory Zoom calls.
“As we see AI and automation and optimal efficiency coming
across all different sectors, people are going to have to reinvent
themselves and transition,” Apolo says. Compared to increasingly capable computers, “what makes us human is what makes us
make mistakes. But it’s also what gives us this layer of context and
an unmeasurable, limitless potential. We can’t forget about that.”
For Apolo, our embrace of each other and our shared human
eccentricities will determine how we fare in this next chapter of
humanity’s story. “The creativity that exists within the human
being is in our volatility, is in our unpredictable nature. That is
what makes us so special. Harnessing our consciousness and not
looking at it in terms of a weakness, but instead looking at it as,
‘Hey, I can do things that others aren’t able to do.’ That’s a real
strength, and one that we all need to take a lot of ownership over
as we move forward.”
Wall Street and Silicon Valley superfans will laud the latest
celebrity CEO who uses cutting-­edge algorithms to push harder,
faster, and more ruthlessly at the expense of healthy competition,
exploited people all over the world, and their own firm’s labor
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LEADERSHIP IS A RELATIONSHIP
force. That approach can win media accolades and the love of
shareholders, and it certainly can get results over the short and
even medium terms. But its cost is clear.
Putting people first in our digital age will be less efficient. It
will probably take longer to get projects started. It will often be
tiring, sometimes be frustrating, and always require your heart.
It’s not for the monomaniacal optimizer or the undetermined.
Putting people first will, however, imbue your life with a richness
that you can’t create in any other way. It will connect you to the
community where you live, the community in which you work,
and whichever other communities you choose to join. You’ll
engage with the messy, vivid, fascinating, living stories of people
who will open new worlds to you. You’ll enjoy the benefits we’ve
explored throughout this book, from stability and resilience to
accountability and forgiveness to trust and strong coalitions and
loyalty. You will make your life more vital for both yourself and
others. You will also set yourself up for success over the long haul
in whatever you do.
As you confront the challenges of your life and our shared
world, choose to walk with others.9 Our world’s biggest problems
need complex, technical, and coordinated solutions. We encourage you to discover those solutions by starting with a time-­tested
truth: other people matter. Let’s meet new people, strengthen
our bonds, and improve the world together.
Acknowledgments
From Both of Us
A book owes its existence to far more people than its authors—­
especially a book that relies on interviews. First and foremost,
thanks to everyone who spoke with us and shared their stories:
Erica Bamford, John Beilein, Leia Capps, Dr. Chaveso Cook,
Clarence Garner, Matt Hasselbeck, Dr. Virginia Hill, Joyce
Jelks, Ashley Jung, Sean Kelley, Liz MacWilliams, Bob McDonald, Keith Moneymaker, Noah Ohlsen, Apolo Ohno, Sesil Pir,
Coleman Ruiz, Erin Scruggs, Chandler Smith, Dan Streetman,
Michael Sullivan, Kelly Swaintek, J. T. Thomson, and Kerri
Walsh Jennings.
Thanks especially to Bob McDonald, who founded the
McDonald Conference for Leaders of Character. We met at the
inaugural conference in 2012, and our relationship since has produced, among other things, this book.
The team at Wiley helped us turn an idea into a book. Tim
Gallan lent his expert instincts, reading, and counsel to the project throughout the writing process, and the book benefited
enormously. As managing editor, Dawn Kilgore saw the project
through the entire publication process. Jeanenne Ray brought
173
174Acknowledgments
the book to Wiley. Sally Baker handled so much of the process of
getting the book published. Premkumar Narayanan was crucial
to producing the final book. Many other people at Wiley made
this project what it is, and the house took a chance on us in the
middle of the pandemic. We can’t thank them enough.
From Willys
Thanks to Mike for having the idea for this book and asking
if I’d like to work together on it. This project took a variety of
turns before becoming Leadership Is a Relationship, each of which
gradually shaped and improved the final result. I couldn’t ask for
a more energetic, passionate, and determined partner.
Thanks to my parents, Elizabeth and Dave, who’ve supported not only my curiosity but also my ostensibly irrational
decision to be a writer. For all the people who patronizingly
asked, “What do you do with an English degree?,” my parents
were not among them.
My sister Kathryn has been a constant ally and advocate,
and our relationship has taught me so much about relating to and
caring for other people. Watching her adult life unfold, I’m ever
more proud of the choices she makes and how she’s devoted her
work to improving the lives of vulnerable and struggling people.
My partner Anna inspires me, challenges me, and loves me in
a way that feels as natural as it is life-­affirming. She brings beauty
to our life together and teaches me every day about how to lead
and empower others, often in very challenging circumstances.
She’s also a gifted editor who directly improved this book.
175
Acknowledgments
Lastly, thanks to the teachers who helped me and so many
other students become wiser, more competent, and more benevolent presences in our world. I was extremely fortunate to have
teachers throughout my life who encouraged me, pushed me, or
pointed me toward things they knew would nourish my mind
and spirit. This list is hardly comprehensive, but thanks to Hilda
Rhodes, Elizabeth Olbrych, Susan O’Hara, Lisabeth Comm,
James D’Amico, Skip Horack, Brittany Perham, and David Henderson for being tremendously important teachers in my life. I
can only hope to keep growing into the lessons they taught me.
From Mike
Teamwork makes the dream work. I’m grateful for Willys’s
answering the call and taking the chance to work on such a big
project with me. We started with nothing more than a general
azimuth, and together carved out this powerful narrative and
contribution to the leadership space.
The seed for this book was planted in 2010 while I was a
captain in the Army and a graduate student at the University of
Michigan. The man responsible for that seed, Dr. Chris Peterson,
passed away of a heart attack at the young age of 61. I’m thankful
for the few years I had under his mentorship, and proud that his
legacy lives on through this book and the social-­emotional learning organization I co-­founded, The Positivity Project.
To all of the incredible leaders who carved out time in their
busy schedule to share their story and their perspective on this
book’s thesis, thank you! They represent many different fields
176Acknowledgments
including education, business, the military, the nonprofit sector, and sports. Their insight is what propelled this book to new
heights. I’m honored to call most of them friends.
I am forever grateful to my wife, Genevieve, for her constant
support to whatever project I undertake—­and for the steadfast
leadership she provides our family and homestead. She proudly
says her mission is to get me to Heaven, and hopefully she is as
successful in that mission as she has been in leading our family.
To my energetic kids, who aren’t big fans of sleep—­Eli,
Adelaide, Therese, Matthias, and Zelie. The decision to have a
child is to accept that your heart will forever walk outside your
body. I’m so blessed to have them in my life and for the constant
source of inspiration they provide.
I’m also so thankful for my parents, Tim and Denise, and
the relationship example they set for Monica, Mark, Bridget, and
me. They prioritized relationships in our house, but also in our
community. From Little League to delivering Meals on Wheels
to visiting shut-­in neighbors—­they set the example of what it
means to put people first.
Since 1979, God has blessed me with thousands of people who have led, mentored, coached, taught, and guided me—­
shaping me into the person I am today. I can’t possibly recognize
them all here, but I’m so grateful for every single one of them.
Their embrace of this book’s thesis is what gives me such confidence in the impact that Leadership Is a Relationship will make on
everyone who reads it.
Notes
Introduction: Relationships Under Siege
1. Trevor Haynes, “Dopamine, Smartphones & You: A Battle for
Your Time,” Science in the News, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, May 1, 2018, https://sitn.hms.
harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-­s martphones-­b attle-­t ime/.
Haynes’s article offers an accessible overview of the neurobiology
of smartphone use.
2. Melanie Curtin, “Are You On Your Phone Too Much? The Average
Person Spends This Many Hours On It Every Day,” Inc., October
30, 2018, https://www.inc.com/melanie-­curtin/are-­you-­on-­your-­
phone-­too-­much-­average-­person-­spends-­this-­many-­hours-­on-­it-­
every-­day.html.
3. James Vincent, “Former Facebook Exec Says Social Media Is
Ripping Apart Society,” Verge, December 11, 2017, https://www
.theverge.com/2017/12/11/16761016/former-­f acebook-­e xec-­
ripping-­apart-­society.
4. Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin, 2015); Sherry Turkle “The Flight
from Conversation,” The New York Times, April 21, 2012, EPUB.
5. Ibid.
177
178Notes
6. “Loneliness and the Workplace: 2020 U.S. Report,” Cigna Newsroom, Cigna, January 23, 2020, https://www.cigna.com/static/
www-­cigna-­com/docs/about-­us/newsroom/studies-­and-­reports/
combatting-­loneliness/cigna-­2020-­loneliness-­factsheet.pdf.
7. Oxford Reference, s.v. “Recency bias,” accessed May 22, 2021,
https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority
.20110803100407676.
8. “American Time Use Survey—­
2019 Results,” Economic News
Releases, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, June 25, 2020, https://
www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf.
9. Ira Flatow, “The Myth of Multitasking,” NPR, May 10, 2013,
https://www.npr.org/2013/05/10/182861382/the-­m yth-­o f-­
multitasking.
10. Jamie Ducharme, “COVID-­
19 Is Making America’s Loneliness Epidemic Even Worse,” Time, May 8, 2020, https://time
.com/5833681/loneliness-­covid-­19/.
11. For an accessible, and probably the most prominent, example of
this research, see Frans de Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know
How Smart Animals Are? (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016).
12. Alexandrea J. Ravenelle, “For Workers in the Gig Economy, Client
Interactions Can Get . . . Weird,” Wired, March 17, 2019, https://
www.wired.com/story/book-­excerpt-­gig-­economy-­weirdness/.
Chapter 1: The Right Amount of Tension
1. All Kerri Walsh Jennings quotations come from the authors’ interview with her, February 26, 2021.
2. All Erica Bamford quotations come from the authors’ interview
with her, February 11, 2021.
3. All Dan Streetman quotations come from the authors’ interview
with him, February 14, 2021.
179
Notes
Chapter 2: Forgiveness Every Day
1. All Virginia Hill quotations come from the authors’ interview with
her, November 5, 2019.
2. Eleanor Chute, “Pittsburgh Lincoln PreK–5 among City Schools
Receiving STAR Honor,” Pittsburgh Post-­Gazette, March 25, 2015,
https://www.post-­g azette.com/news/education/2015/03/25/
Pittsburgh-­L incoln-­P reK-­5 -­a mong-­c ity-­s chools-­h onored/
stories/201503250049.
3. Jannelle Allong-­Diakabana, “New Commandant of Cadets Humbled and Ready to Inspire,” U.S. Army Articles, U.S. Army, last
modified July 17, 2019, https://www.army.mil/article/224671/
new_commandant_of_cadets_humbled_and_ready_to_inspire.
4. All J.T. Thomson quotations come from the authors’ interview
with him, November 26, 2019.
Chapter 3: Jump Back Together
1. Maria Konnikova, “How People Learn to Become Resilient,”
The New Yorker, February 11, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/
science/maria-­konnikova/the-­secret-­formula-­for-­resilience.
2. Parul Sehgal, “The Profound Emptiness of ‘Resilience,’”
New York Times Magazine, December 1, 2015, https://www
.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/magazine/the-­profound-­emptiness-­of-­
resilience.html.
3. “Google Books Ngram Viewer for ‘Resilience,’” Google
Books Ngram Viewer, accessed March 1, 2021, https://books
.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=resilience&year_
start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&
smoothing=3.
180Notes
4. OED Online, s.v. “resilient (adj. and n.),” March 2021, www.oed
.com/view/Entry/163621.
5. “Men’s Basketball Release -­Jan. 27,” Big Ten Conference, January 27, 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20110725195959/
http://www.bigten.org/sports/m-­baskbl/spec-­rel/012709aab.html
(archived site accessed through the Internet Archive).
6. All John Beilein quotations come from the authors’ interview with
him, December 17, 2020.
7. All Ashley Jung quotations come from the authors’ interview with
her, February 16, 2021. Dialogue attributed to Paige Walker comes
from Jung’s account.
8. “Our Story,” Stella Valle, accessed March 5, 2021, https://stellavalle
.com/pages/ourstory.
9. All Liz MacWilliams quotations come from the authors’ interview
with her, January 12, 2021.
10. Sarah Amer, “Inspiring America: N.C. Principal Visits Every Student’s Home,” NBC News Online, March 1, 2017, https://www
.nbcnews.com/feature/inspiring-­america/inspiring-­america-­n-­c-­
principal-­visits-­every-­student-­s-­home-­n726971.
Chapter 4: The Vocabulary of Trust
1. All Kelly Swaintek quotations come from the authors’ interview
with her, February 9, 2021.
2. All Chaveso Cook quotations come from the authors’ interview
with him, February 2, 2021.
3. All Erin Scruggs quotations come from the authors’ interview with
her, February 19, 2021.
4. Ryan W. Buell, Robert S. Huckman, and Sam Travers, “Improving Access at VA,” Harvard Business School Case Studies, no.
617-­
012 (November 4, 2016): 1–5, https://hbsp.harvard.edu/
Notes
181
product/617012-­P DF-­E NG?Ntt=Improving%20Access%20
at%20VA.
5. All Bob McDonald quotations come from the authors’ interview
with him, January 12, 2021.
6. T. J. Wilson, “My VA Training Aims to Accomplish Priorities for
Veterans, Employees,” VAntage Point, U.S. Department of Veterans
Affairs, February 29, 2016, https://blogs.va.gov/VAntage/26101/
leaders-­developing-­leaders-­ii/.
Chapter 5: From Pie in the Sky to History
1. Michael Sullivan in conversation with the authors, December 18,
2020. Otherwise uncited background information on the situation
in Marjah comes from our conversation with Sullivan and additional email correspondence with him. Wherever possible, we’ve
cited publicly accessible journalism or documents about the operation in addition to Sullivan’s account.
2. Michael Erwin, “The Insurgent-­
Narcotic Nexus in Helmand
Province,” Combating Terrorism Center Sentinel 2, no. 9 (2009):
5–7, https://ctc.usma.edu/wp-­content/uploads/2010/08/CTC
Sentinel-­Vol2Iss9-­Art2.pdf.
3. Ibid., 6.
4. Kabul Office, “Afghanistan Counternarcotics: Narco-­Insurgency
Hub Decimated by Afghan and U.S. Forces,” WikiLeaks Cable:
09KABUL1361_a, May 31, 2009, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/
cables/09KABUL1361_a.html. We cite a document hosted on
WikiLeaks with reluctance, and only as additional corroboration
of Sullivan’s account of the operation in Marjah.
5. All Michael Sullivan quotations come from the authors’ interview
with him, December 18, 2020.
6. Erwin, “The Insurgent-­Narcotic Nexus,” 6.
182Notes
7. “U.S. to Shift Approach to Afghanistan’s Drug Trade,” Los Angeles
Times, June 28, 2009, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-­xpm-­
2009-­jun-­28-­fg-­afghan-­drugs28-­story.html.
8. Kevin Whitelaw, “U.S. Shifts Tactics To Pursue Afghan Drug
Traffickers,” NPR, September 23, 2009, https://www.npr.org/
templates/story/story.php?storyId=113125505.
9. Gabby Landsverk, “CrossFit Gyms around the World Are
Rebranding after the CEO’s Insensitive Comments about George
Floyd: ‘They Don’t Own the Workout,’” Insider, June 9, 2020,
https://www.insider.com/gyms-­a re-­d ropping-­c rossfit-­b rand-­
after-­glassman-­george-­floyd-­comments-­2020-­6.
10. Alyx Gorman and Josh Taylor, “CrossFit CEO Greg Glassman Resigns after Offensive George Floyd and Coronavirus
Tweets,” Guardian, June 9, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/
us-­news/2020/jun/10/greg-­glassman-­crossfit-­ceo-­resigns-­george-­
floyd-­protest-­coronavirus-­tweets-­conspiracy-­theories.
11. Ryan Brooks and David Mack, “The Head Of CrossFit Has
Resigned After Telling Staff On A Zoom Call, ‘We’re Not Mourning For George Floyd,’” BuzzFeed News, June 9, 2020, https://www
.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryancbrooks/crossfit-­ceo-­founder-­
zoom-­greg-­glassman-­george-­floyd.
12. Landsverk, “CrossFit Gyms around the World.”
13. All Chandler Smith quotations come from the authors’ interview
with him, December 17, 2020.
14. Katherine Rosman, “CrossFit Owner Fostered Sexist Company
Culture, Workers Say,” New York Times, June 20, 2020, https://
www.nytimes.com/2020/06/20/style/greg-­g lassman-­c rossfit-­
sexism.html.
15. Sarah Lacy, “‘Do you fight dirty? Yeah, Fuck yeah.’ Why CrossFit Is So Litigious,” Pando, November 13, 2015, https://pando
183
Notes
.com/2015/11/13/do-­y ou-­f ight-­d irty-­y eah-­f uck-­y eah-­w hy-­
crossfit-­so-­litigious/.
16. All Noah Ohlsen quotations come from the authors’ interview
with him, February 12, 2021.
17. Chandler Smith, statement about the 2020 CrossFit Games,
Instagram, June 7, 2020, accessed March 25, 2021, https://www
.instagram.com/p/CBJy7_tlRA2.
18. Katherine Rosman, “Greg Glassman, Embattled Owner of
CrossFit, to Sell His Company,” New York Times, June 24, 2020,
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/style/crossfit-­sold-­greg-­
glassman.html.
19. Lawrence Ostlere, “Reebok Ends CrossFit Sponsorship after
CEO’s Tweet,” Independent, June 8, 2020, https://www.independent
.co.uk/sport/crossfit-­r eebok-­g reg-­g lassman-­t weet-­g eorge-­
floyd-­a9554331.html.
20. Rosman, “Greg Glassman, Embattled Owner.”
Chapter 6: The Long and Winding Road
1. All Joyce Jelks quotations come from the authors’ interview with
her, March 23, 2021.
2. If you missed it, check out Chapter 5 for the full story.
3. Raymond M. Kethledge and Michael S. Erwin, Lead Yourself First:
Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude (New York: Bloomsbury,
2017), 91–96. Mike’s first book includes a longer version of what
inspired him to found Team Red, White & Blue.
4. All Michael S. Erwin quotations come from the authors’ conversation, April 7, 2021.
5. All Keith Moneymaker quotations come from the authors’ interview with him, December 29, 2020.
184Notes
6. “Flooding from Hurricane Matthew in North Carolina,” Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, last updated December 18,
2020, https://www.cdc.gov/cpr/readiness/stories/nc.htm.
7. Laura Douglass, “Dreams 4 All Looks to Expand,” The Pilot
(Southern Pines, NC), November 18, 2018, https://www.thepilot.
com/news/dreams-­4-­all-­looks-­to-­expand/article_4b972068-­e9de-­
11e8-­a1de-­0322762f5855.html. This is just one example of the
local coverage of Keith, Sweet Dreams, and Dreams 4 All.
Chapter 7: Stable Ground
1. “Employee Tenure in 2020,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S.
Department of Labor, September 22, 2020, https://www.bls.gov/
news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf.
2. Christopher Rich, “Talking Tenure: A Look at Generational Job
Hopping,” Quality Info, State of Oregon Employment Department, January 7, 2020, https://www.qualityinfo.org/-­
/talking-­
tenure-­a-­look-­at-­generational-­job-­hopping.
3. Suhauna Hussain and Johana Bhuiyan, “Prop. 22 Passed, a Major
Win for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash. What Happens Next?” Los Angeles
Times, November 4, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/business/
technology/story/2020-­11-­04/prop-­22-­passed-­what-­happens-­next.
4. Willys worked for Google from 2015 to 2017, and worked for
another company on-­site at Google’s headquarters in Mountain
View, California, in 2014 and 2015.
5. Charles Duhigg, “What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build
the Perfect Team,” New York Times Magazine, February 25, 2016,
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-­google-­
learned-­from-­its-­quest-­to-­build-­the-­perfect-­team.html.
185
Notes
6. Ibid.
7. Sesil Pir, in discussion with the authors, March 26, 2021.
8. “Administrative Organizational Chart/Superintendent, Clarence
Garner,” Grand Blanc Community Schools, December 9, 2019,
https://www.gbcs.org/Page/1619.
9. All Clarence Garner quotations come from the authors’ interview
with him, December 30, 2020.
10. See RiShawn Biddle, “Don’t Kill Remote Learning. Black and
Brown Families Need It.,” New York Times, June 7, 2021, https://
www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/opinion/remote-­l earning-­n yc
.html. Biddle’s essay focuses on the nationwide consequences of
eliminating virtual instruction during the Covid vaccine rollout.
He doesn’t discuss Grand Blanc specifically.
11. Dylan Scott and Christina Animashaun, “Covid-­19’s Stunningly
Unequal Death Toll in America, in One Chart,” Vox, October 2, 2020,
https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-­covid19/2020/10/2/21496884/
us-­covid-­19-­deaths-­by-­race-­black-­white-­americans.
12. All quotations from Leia and Taylor Capps come from the authors’
interview with them on April 5, 2021, and additional correspondence in May 2021.
13. All Sean Kelley quotations come from the authors’ interview with
him, March 11, 2021.
14. Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling
Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” New York Times, August 15,
2015,
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-­
amazon-­wrestling-­big-­ideas-­in-­a-­bruising-­workplace.html.
15. Sean Kelley, email message to the authors, April 20, 2021.
186Notes
Chapter 8: Start Leading with Relationships
1. All Matt Hasselbeck quotations come from the authors’ interview
with him, February 19, 2021.
2. All Coleman Ruiz quotations come from the authors’ interview
with him, March 5, 2021.
3. Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), Chapter 11, EPUB.
4. Gwendolyn Seidman, “Why Do We Like People Who Are Similar to Us?,” Psychology Today, December 18, 2018, https://www
.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/close-­encounters/201812/why-­
do-­we-­people-­who-­are-­similar-­us.
5. “Positive Psychology’s 24 Character Strengths,” The Positivity
Project, June 22, 2020, https://posproject.org/character-­strengths/.
6. Adam Grant, “Taken for Granted: Brené Brown on What Vulnerability Isn’t,” February 22, 2021, in Worklife with Adam Grant, podcast, MP3 audio, 40:44, https://www.ted.com/podcasts/worklife,
29:20.
7. Gregory Stock, Book of Questions: Revised and Updated (New York:
Workman, 2013).
8. All Apolo Ohno quotations come from the authors’ interview with
him, May 6, 2021.
9. New research in cognition and human history suggests that Homo
sapiens has been so successful as a species because we can coordinate effectively with others. For one example of this kind of work,
see Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods’s Survival of the Friendliest:
Understanding our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity
(New York: Random House, 2020).
About the Authors
Michael S. Erwin is the executive director of Team Red, White
& Blue and the CEO of the Character & Leadership Center,
where he’s worked with organizations including Walmart, PWC,
Amazon, special forces units, and the Boston Celtics. Mike
­
­graduated from West Point and served on active duty in the
US Army for 13 years, including three deployments to Iraq and
Afghanistan, and continues to serve as a lieutenant colonel in
the US Army Reserve. Mike earned a master’s degree in positive
psychology and leadership at the University of ­Michigan under
the co-­founder of positive psychology, Dr. Chris ­Peterson. He
also co-­founded the Positivity Project, a character education
organization that empowers America’s youth to build positive relationships. He is the co-­author of Lead Yourself First (Bloomsbury,
2017) with Raymond M. Kethledge. Mike lives with his ­family
on a 32-­acre homestead outside Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Willys DeVoll is a writer, creator, and speaker. He is the
founder of Will Digital, a writing and design agency. He’s worked
187
188
About the Authors
as a writer for a variety of technology companies including
Google and Airbnb, and has been a regular keynote speaker
at industry conferences. Willys earned master’s and bachelor’s
degrees from Stanford University, where he studied English and
philosophy. He lives with his partner in the Northeast. This is
his first book.
Index
A
Accountability, lessons on
from CEO, 17–21
from coach, 11–17
from Olympic champion, 2–11
questions for reflection, 23
takeaways, 22–23
Afghanistan’s drug trade, 89, 93,
95, 181–182
Allong-­Diakabana, Jannelle, 179
Alward, Trevor, 135
Amazon, 145–146, 148, 151, 152, 185
Amer, Sarah, 180
Animashaun, Christina, 185
Apologies, 26, 168. See also
Mistakes, admitting
Army commander’s story, 33–40
Army Warrior Fitness Team, 100
Artificial intelligence (AI),
xx–xxi, 170, 171
B
Bain & Company c­ onsulting firm,
67
Bamford, Erica, 11–16, 21
Beilein, John, 46–52, 58
Beilein, Kathleen, 52
Beilein, William, 49
Bhuiyan, Johana, 184
Biddle, RiShawn, 185
Biden, Jill, 82
Biden, Joe, 82, 83
Black Lives Matter movement, 96
Body language, xix, 16, 170–171
Book of Questions, The, 167
Braeger, Dena, 121
Brooks, Ryan, 182
Brown, Brené, 165, 186
Buell, Ryan, 180
C
Caldwell, Matt, 120
Capps, Leia, 141–145
Capps, Taylor, 141–145
Career planning, advice for, 19
Change, sudden, 46–52
Character Strengths and Virtues, 163
Character-­strength vocabulary,
163–165, 186
189
190Index
Chute, Eleanor, 179
Coaching
intelligent, 11–17
resilience and, 46–52
Coalition-­building
for a boycott, 96–105
questions for reflection, 107
Sully and the Green Berets,
88–96, 104, 105
takeaways on, 106
Communication skills
character-­strength
­vocabulary, 163–165
communal language, 74–75, 167
everyday reminders, 168
listening, 17–18, 19, 21
positive language, 167–168
thoughtful questions, 166–167
Complexity, relationship, xiii-­xv
Concentration lines, 158–160
Cook, Chaveso, 71, 72–78, 80, 167
Coughlin, Tom, 159
Covid-­19 crisis
challenges of, 169–170
culture of trust and, 67, 78, 80
everyday sociality and, xviii–xix
loneliness and, xiv, 178
population most affected
by, 138, 185
resilience and, 53, 64
school reopenings and, 137–140
CrossFit fitness program,
97–105, 182–183
Cuban, Mark, 55
Culture
of forgiveness, 41
stability and, 147–148
of trust, 67, 78, 80
Curtin, Melanie, 177
D
Davíðsdóttir, Katrín, 99, 100
De Waal, Frans, 178
DeVoll, Willys, 122, 184
Dilfer, Trent, 163
Distracted people, xv–xvii
Distractions, digital, ix–xiii, 123
Douglass, Laura, 184
Dreams 4 All Foundation,
124–129, 184
Ducharme, Jamie, xviii, 178
Duhigg, Charles, 133, 184
E
Edmondson, Amy, 133
Eisenhower, Dwight, xxiv
Eramo, Kristi, 101
Erwin, Genevieve, 117, 118
Erwin, Mike, 30, 116–123,
166, 181, 183
Expectations
clear, 12, 13, 23
failure to meet, 13–15
managing, 168
F
Facebook, xi, xii, xiii, xvi, 126, 177
Failure Resume, 72–73
Family stability, 141–145
Firing abusive employees, 147
Flatow, Ira, 178
Floyd, George, 96, 97, 182
Forgiveness, as character strength, 164
Forgiveness, lessons on
Army commander’s story, 33–40
questions for reflection, 42
school principal’s story, 27–33
takeaways, 41
Formalities, unnecessary, 85
191
Index
G
Garner, Clarence, 134–140, 154
Gates of Fire, 161, 186
Gervais, Michael, 7, 9, 10
Gestures, caring, 81
Gig economy, xx, 132–133, 178
Glassman, Greg, 97, 98, 100, 101,
102, 104, 182, 183
Google, 133, 184
Gorman, Alyx, 182
Grand Blanc schools, 134–140, 185
Grant, Adam, 165, 186
Green Berets, 88, 91, 94
Greiner, Lori, 55
H
Hare, Brian, 186
Harnish, Chandler, 163
Hasselbeck, Matt, 158–159, 162
Haynes, Trevor, 177
Hill, Virginia, 27–33, 40, 41, 59
Holbrooke, Richard, 93
Horsman, Patrick, 98
Huard, Brock, 163
Huckman, Robert S., 180
Hurricane Matthew, 126, 184
Hussain, Suhauna, 184
I
Intimacy, formalities versus, 81–85
Introspection, 13, 23
J
Jelks, Joyce, 110–115, 120, 121, 122
Jennings, Casey, 5
Jennings, Kerri Walsh, 2–11,
13, 16, 21
Job-­hopping, 132, 184
Jump back together, 45. See also
Resilience
Jung, Ashley, 53–58, 62
K
Kantor, Jodi, 146, 185
Kelley, Sean, 145–154
Kethledge, Raymond M., 183
Konnikova, Maria, 44, 45, 179
L
Lacy, Sarah, 182
Landsverk, Gabby, 97, 98, 182
Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership
Through Solitude, 183
Leadership
as character strength, 164
defined, xxiv–xxv
Leadership, relationship-­based
need for, xxi–xxiii
seven key areas and, xxiii–xxiv
tactics for, 158–169
tomorrow’s challenges
and, 169–172
LinkedIn, 73, 79, 80, 152
Listening to others
broadcasting versus, 17–18, 21
social media and, 19–20
Locker, Jake, 163
Loneliness epidemic, xiv, 178
Loyalty (paying things forward)
Dreams 4 All Foundation,
124–129, 184
questions for reflection, 130
takeaways on, 129
Team Red, White & Blue,
116–123, 166, 183
Luck, Andrew, 163
192Index
M
Mack, David, 182
MacWilliams, Liz, 59–62
Mayer, Travis, 101
May-­Treanor, Misty, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,
8, 9, 10, 16
McBride, Jimmy, 117
McDonald, Bob, 81–85
McDonald, Diane, 82, 83
McDonald Conference for Leaders
of Character, 122
Meals, connecting through,
163, 168, 176
Mentors, Military, 72, 77
Mercy, promoting, 40–41. See also
Forgiveness, lessons on
Michigan Wolverines, 46–52
Microsoft, 145, 149, 150
Military Mentors, 72, 77
Mistakes, admitting, 38–39, 41, 168
Mitchell, Donovan, 51
Moneymaker, Keith, 124–129
Multitasking, xvi–xvii, 178
Myth of Multitasking, The, 178
N
Nadella, Satya, 149, 150
Nass, Cliff, xvi, xvii
Networking, 121
Nike, 100, 111
O
Obama, Barack, 82
Ohlsen, Noah, 98, 99, 100, 101,
102–104, 105
Ohno, Apolo, 170–171
Olympic champion, lesson
from, 2–11
Ostlere, Lawrence, 183
P
Pandemic lockdown
challenges of, 169–170
culture of trust and, 67, 78, 80
everyday sociality and,
xviii–xix
loneliness and, xiv, 178
population most affected
by, 138, 185
remote education and,
137–140, 185
resilience and, 53, 64
Peterson, Chris, 163
Pflugrath, Jessica, xviii
Phones, time spent on,
x–xiii, xvi, 177
Pir, Sesil, 134
Positive language, 167–168
Positivity Project, 30, 123
Pressfield, Stephen, 161, 186
Priester, Danny, 75–77, 78
Problems, directly confronting,
11
Proposition 22, California’s,
132, 184
Psychological safety, 133
Purdue Boilermakers, 50
Q
Questions, thoughtful, 166–167
Questions for Reflection,
reviewing, 169
193
Index
R
Ravenelle, Alexandrea J., xx, 178
Reciprocity, 72, 74, 86
Recruiters, successful
people-­first approach of, 145–154
as role models, 78–79
Recruiting allies. See
Coalition-­building
Reebok, 102, 183
Relationship-­based leadership
need for, xxi–xxiii
seven key areas and, xxiii–xxiv
tactics for, 158–169
tomorrow’s challenges
and, 169–172
Relationships under siege
in complicated world, xiii–xv
connecting in digital
­economy, xv–xxi
Covid-­19 shutdown and, xiv
digital distractions, ix–xiii
leadership and, xxi–xxv
smartphones and, x–xiii, xvi, 177
social media and, xi–xii, 177
Reminders, everyday, 168
Remote education, 137–140, 185
Remote relationship-­building,
19–20, 78–81
Remote work
drawbacks of, xx
everyday sociality and, xviii
video chats and, xviii, xix
Zoom fatigue and, xvi, 78, 171
Resilience
culture of, 45
in groups, 53
literature on, 179–180
obsession over, 44–45
questions for reflection, 64
sudden change and, 46–52
takeaways on, 63
of two entrepreneurs, 53–58
Rich, Christopher, 184
Rosman, Katherine, 98, 182, 183
Ross, April, 3
ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training
Corps), 112–114, 115, 122
Ruiz, Coleman, 160–162, 165
Rule 29, 121
S
Sage Harvest Gourmet Jerky,
145
Sandel, Joe, 38
Saving Private Ryan, 49
Schools
forgiveness in, 27–33
resilience of, 59–62
stability of, 134–140, 185
Scott, Dylan, 185
Scruggs, Erin, 79–81
Seattle Seahawks, 158
Sehgal, Parul, 44, 179
Seidman, Gwendolyn, 186
Seligman, Martin, 163
Shark Tank, 55, 56
Smartphone use
relationships under siege and,
x–xiii, xvi, 177
reminder regarding, 168
Smith, Blaine, 119
Smith, Chandler, 98, 99,
100–105, 183
Smith, Rusty, 163
194Index
Social media
activism, 105
dangers of, xii, 177
goal of, xi–xii
listening versus
­oversharing on, 19–20
Stability
agility and, 134
family, 141–145
gig economy and, 132–133
at Grand Blanc schools,
134–140, 185
people-­first approach for, 145–154
questions for reflection, 156
takeaways on, 155
turnover and, 132, 134,
154, 155, 184
Stella Valle jewelry brand,
53–58, 180
Stock, Gregory, 167, 186
Streetman, Dan, 17–21, 22
Streitfeld, David, 146, 185
Sullivan, Michael, 88–96,
104, 105, 181
Swaintek, Kelly, 66–71, 72, 75, 80
Swanigan, Caleb, 50
Sweet Dreams Mattresses &
More, 124, 126
T
Taliban forces, 88–89, 93, 94, 95
Taylor, Josh, 182
Teaching framework, four-­part, 12
Team Red, White & Blue,
116–123, 166, 183
Thomson, J. T., 34–40, 41
Thoughtful questions, 166–167
TIBCO software company, 17
Travers, Sam, 180
Trust, fostering
intimacy versus formalities, 81–85
with language that
­equalizes, 85, 86
one manager’s emphasis on, 66–71
questions for reflection, 86
reciprocity and, 71–78
small gestures for, 78–81
takeaways on, 86
Turkle, Sherry, xii, 177
Turnover, employee, 132, 134,
154, 155, 184
TV watching, xv
V
Veterans Affairs (VA), 82–85,
119, 180–181
Video chats, xviii, xix. See also
Zoom fatigue
Vincent, James, 177
Vulnerability. See also
Failure Resume
boundaries and, 165–166
sharing, 86, 160–162
W
Walker, Paige, 53–58, 62
West Point
co-­author from, 116, 117
consultant from, 67
entrepreneurs from, 53–54, 56
forgiveness story shared at, 33–40
mentor from, 72, 73, 75–78
195
Index
Whitelaw, Kevin, 182
Widell, Chris, 118, 119, 122
Wieden+Kennedy advertising
agency, 110–111
Wilson, T. J., 181
Woods, Vanessa, 186
Z
Zoom call, Crossfit owner’s,
97, 98, 182
Zoom fatigue, xvi, 78, 171
Zorn, Jim, 159
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