Extraordinary Leaders - A special series on becoming remarkable - Episode 1

This is a 3 episode podcast special.

In each episode, I share the answers to three big questions I have had about leadership over the last 35 years:

• What is leadership, and what is the extraordinary version of it that achieves more and has greater impact?
• What are the most important skills and techniques that allow these extraordinary leaders to be more effective and successful?
• How do these remarkable everyday leaders grow from ordinary to extraordinary?  

Episode 1: The secret of extraordinary leadership

In this first of a three-episode series on extraordinary leadership I share the two magic ingredients that are essential for more remarkable impact and results.  

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Take Care, Lead Well.

Transcript

It's not about the ordinary. We've got enough of that. It's about the extraordinary. And we need more.



 Hi there, I'm Gerard Penna, and welcome to the Xtraordinary Leaders Podcast, where we spend time with recognised leaders and global experts, exploring the art and science of remarkable leadership.



 Welcome to the Xtraordinary Leaders Podcast.



 Yesterday was a celebratory day in my house. My son Dash turned 16, and like most birthdays or anniversaries, it was an opportunity to celebrate all the developments and the changes and the growth, but also to reflect on the milestones and the moments. We had lots of laughs talking about some of the times that we'd spent with Dash and some of the experiences that we'd had, and some of the very funny things that he'd said or done. Which had me thinking about another anniversary which occurred recently.



 Last month marked the 35th year that I have been researching, investigating, practicing, working on, or just generally being fascinated by this topic, leadership.



 35 years ago I had the opportunity to be involved in the Delivery of Leadership Program, a small but important step in my involvement over the last 35 years in developing and growing and cultivating more leadership, and even better leadership in the world around us.



 Looking back, I have some clarity that during those three plus decades, there's been three big questions that I've been seeking to ask and answer. The first decade was occupied with me trying to understand what is this thing called leadership?



 What is its function? What does it look like? What does it do?



 The second decade had me focused a lot on the question of what's this better version of leadership that I'm seeing around me as I start to engage with organisations and start to get exposed to more leaders. I noticed that there was a different version of leadership that was able to produce more, do more, achieve more, catalyse and mobilize people more effectively. I became fascinated by this sort of leadership which was beyond ordinary, beyond a ho-hum, beyond average garden variety leadership.



 Then the third decade, which is continuing on now for me as well, is the question about how do we cultivate more of this better version of leadership. I thought it would be helpful at this juncture, at this moment, this 35-year anniversary, to share some answers to those questions, to share the insights and the understandings that I've been able to develop, that I've learnt through and with other people as well as some that I've discovered on my own. Over a podcast series, over three episodes, answering what are some pretty important questions. This first being what is that more extraordinary version of leadership? What makes it more extraordinary? What is it that leaders need to be able to possess or do that allows them to step beyond the ordinary into extraordinary? In a way, I'll be seeking, in answering that first question, to summarise what I've written in my book, Xtraordinary, The Art and Science of Remarkable Leadership.



 The second question that I'll be seeking to answer in the second episode will be the question of how do we cultivate more of it? How do you grow into being a more extraordinary leader? In that episode, I intend to focus on what we refer to as the horizontal development. That is, what are the skills and the techniques or the habits that I might need to acquire and incorporate into my daily routines, into my regular behaviours that would allow me to step more consistently into that extraordinary leadership. If you're like, "I'm a practical, here's the recipe, here's the answer" kind of episode.



 The third episode, we're going to go a bit deeper though, we're going to go into the territory of vertical development.



 It's starting to get our understanding about what's the work we need to do inside of ourselves



 if we're going to make progress towards this more extraordinary version of leadership. And in that episode, I'll be also sharing with what tends to get leaders hung up, what gets in the way of them being able to step more consistently into those more extraordinary patterns of leadership? What's the internal wiring or the operating script or the belief of the mindsets or the mental models or the underlying non-conscious cognition which holds them back? And share with you some ideas about how you can make progress. So that's the goal here, three episodes answering three big questions. So let's get started.



 And answer the questions, what is leadership and what makes the difference between average and extraordinary leadership?



 Of course, we can't talk about leadership until we define it. Too many people have conversations about this topic without even agreeing on what it is. So I'm going to start with what I find is the most common definition, the most common explanation of what leadership is. And it's possibly the most robust and rigorous.



 If you were to look into all the peer-reviewed research papers that have been produced in academic journals and by institutions, whether it's through psychology or social sciences, political sciences and elsewhere, you will find that leadership is typically defined as something along the lines of the act of influencing and mobilizing other people.



 So the art of leadership is about influencing and mobilizing people. It's engaging them, energizing them, galvanizing them, compelling, influencing them to do well, whatever it is necessary that you're hoping to lead them towards or encourage them towards as a leader, whatever your leadership agenda is, whether it's a purpose or a vision or a mission or just a goal or an objective or an outcome or a set of actions that you would like them to take. But that is the fundamental work of leadership to influence and mobilize other people to do what needs to be done. And in making this distinction, we need to possibly also understand what it is that we sometimes talk about, which is not leadership. Possibly one of the most helpful definitions of what leadership is and what leadership isn't was provided to us by Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, the first female to achieve flag status in the United States military.



 And she said that we manage things and we lead people. So we think about this work of leadership, it implicates people. And it's often when we have a management problem or a management goal or objective, that is to achieve something, to create some shift,



 solve a problem, take advantage of an opportunity. And that problem or that opportunity is embedded in a social system. That is a system that is made up of other people. And that's where leadership becomes part of the equation. We may be fixing a problem or taking advantage of an opportunity, but we're having to engage with people, to lead, to influence, to mobilize other people to take action in order to solve what is fundamentally a management problem or a management opportunity. And those of you who have been listening to this podcast series since its beginning will know that I've had a number of guests who concur with this notion of what leadership is, this definition of leadership. Where they have consistently said that in the world in which they came from, and for example, when I've spoken to people from military backgrounds who are involved intimately in training leaders in that context, in even a place where we expect or have a stereotype that leadership is about telling people what to do, command and comply. They've been very clear and set the record straight for us that in their context, no, leadership is about the art of influence, the act of influence, that in more than 95% of situations, the work is to influence people to do what needs to be done because they want to do it, to mobilize other people.



 So now we can say we've got a clear definition of what leadership is.



 So what makes the difference between ordinary and extraordinary leadership? So what we must be talking about, therefore, is that what is it that allows some leaders to be more effective and more capable at influencing and mobilizing other people and as a consequence, be able to release more energy, more enthusiasm, more commitment, more capability and the potential of other people to be able to do what needs to be done, even if they're not. And in my research, I have found that there are two characteristics, these two things that make the difference. These two things show up consistently in the research, as I've seen it, looking back on more than 70 plus years of quite deep research in social psychology, in management sciences, in organizational sciences, in all sorts of places. And these two characteristics form this red thread that just keep showing up. Whenever there's been a study or research or a commentary on the difference between ordinary and more extraordinary leadership, these two things keep showing up. And these two characteristics are, or two big ingredients, warmth and strength. So what's warmth? Warmth are the qualities and the behaviors that we possess that allow us to connect with people. They allow us to acknowledge that other people are present and that they matter. It also involves those qualities and behaviors that allow us to sense and respond to the world with and through other people. I'll talk more about what that looks like in a moment, but that's about warmth. The warmth is about this sense of us, not just me.



 Strength. Strength are the qualities and the behaviors that allow us to make things happen, allow us to exert our influence on the world around us to make things happen, and even exert our influence on people around us because they are a major part of the world.



 So warmth and strength. Let's talk a bit more about warmth. Here are some examples of warmth. This is what you would see or experience if it were in the room with you and someone else were to be demonstrating it. If that person were to make eye contact with you or smile, these would be nonverbal behaviors which are clearly signaling that you exist and that you matter and that therefore the other person is acknowledging and recognizing your presence. They are examples of warmth. They are connection behaviors.



 If that person were to share their thoughts and their feelings with you, that would be a behavior which says that they trust you, that you are someone who is trustworthy and that is an example of a warm behavior. If in response to you sharing your feelings and your thoughts, they were to show empathy or compassion, that would be another example of warmth because that person is acknowledging the existence of your feelings because feelings are so central, our emotions are so central to our experience as human beings. The moment someone acknowledges our feelings, acknowledges our emotions, they're acknowledging us and the experience we're having in the world. They're saying you matter.



 Other examples of warmth that you might experience from someone else would be if they were to invite you to share what you know, what you think or what you feel. Again, it's a signal to you that you have something to offer, that what you think or you feel or you know matters, that you can make a contribution that would be in some way valuable.



 Likewise, if that person were to just simply involve you in conversations or meetings and decisions. Again, the signal is that you matter.



 So you can start to see that the hallmarks of warmth are signals from other people's behavior, whether it's verbal or non-verbal behavior, which is acknowledging the presence of other people, acknowledging that others have something to offer, acknowledging that others have even a right to be involved in some way.



 And in doing so, warmth allows the leader to connect to others, to connect with others and in the process, make sense of the world and respond to the world with and through other people.



 So let's talk now about strength, the second characteristic, the second big ingredient of extraordinary leadership.



 So what would it look like if it were in the room with you? If you were to see someone standing up straight with their shoulders back or speaking with clarity and volume and appropriate lower pitch, these are all behaviors that signal confidence. They command our attention and the moment therefore that we are paying attention to that person, they are able to exert some influence over us.



 If that person were to communicate facts or opinions or views and in such a way that they were attempting to influence us, to advocate a position to argue a point of view, then that would be an example of strength. The act of arguing or advocating, debating is an act of strength.



 If that person were to share their opinion or view forthrightly, candidly, openly, that would be an act of strength.



 Likewise, if you see someone using their initiative, deciding to take action and then exercising action in response to a problem or an opportunity or a situation, that would be strength.



 It's making things happen. Likewise, executing a plan in a focused or disciplined way over time is another example of strength. So in summary, strength is any behavior which allows an individual to exert their influence on the world around them, which includes other people. Okay, so we've now defined warmth and strength as these two characteristics. And that's helpful because warmth and strength are estimated by social psychologists to explain more than 90% of the variance that occurs in the interactions or relationships between people and how we perceive ourselves and how we perceive other people. And I won't go into all the detail about the literature over time, which has talked about warmth and strength, but they've been investigated quite in depth. We haven't necessarily used the same terms for warmth and strength. Sometimes we've used instead of strength, we've used power or we've used agency as the term or competence. And instead of warmth, we've used love or communion or other terms, but they fundamentally mean the same thing. Strength is about making things happen, exerting our influence on the world around us. Warmth is about acknowledging and recognizing other people and making sense of the world and responding to it with and through other people. What there isn't necessarily common understanding or agreement around, particularly in the general public, is what is the relationship of warmth and strength to each other.



 In my experience and based on all the research that I've seen around adult development and leadership behavior, it appears that the vast majority of people, about 70%, hold warmth and strength to be opposites. That is that they exist on opposite ends of a single continuum. And like a seesaw, if you therefore want more strength, you have to have less warmth or to have more warmth, there must be less strength that to access more of one, you have to be trading off the other characteristic.



 This is unfortunately, empirically and practically untrue and incorrect and very unhelpful to the exercise of leadership.



 The opposite of strength is not warmth. The opposite of strength is weakness or passivity or inaction. So if we characterize strength as making things happen, the opposite of making things happen would be to just let things happen.



 Likewise, the opposite of warmth is not strength.



 If warmth is about making sense of the world with and through other people and acknowledging the existence of other people, then the opposite of warmth must be a complete absence of behavior that in any way acknowledges other people. It would be behavior which is disconnected from other people.



 And there are two different ways in which we can disconnect from other people. One is to do it very actively. We can be very aggressive in our disconnection from others and tell people to f off or to go away or in very active terms, let them know they don't matter.



 Or it can be done in a more passive way, such as just withdrawing or becoming unresponsive to others, doing something that suggests that in no way there's any acknowledgement that other people exist. So the preferred term for the opposite of warmth is in fact disconnection.



 So we have these two characteristics, strength and warmth, that are their own independent characteristics, each with their own opposites. The opposites of warmth being disconnection, the opposite of strength being passive, which now opens up the opportunity to us to be able to think about behavior, in particular that of leaders, not just in terms of is that behavior strong or is that behavior warm, but to think about it in four different combinations. That it is in fact possible that a leader can show up with behavior which is both warm and strong, or behavior which is neither strong nor warm,



 or a third combination would be that they could show up warm but passive, so lacking strength. And a fourth combination would be that they could show up with strength, however lacking warmth, in other words strong but disconnected.



 And this idea that there are these four different patterns is central now to our examination of leadership and has become central to the way in which we can in fact teach leadership.



 So let's examine those four different combinations, because only one of them is an extraordinary leadership pattern. And what do I mean by that? There is only one of those four combinations of warmth and strength that produces superior engagement and results. And I'll talk more about that later on in this episode, but there's only one pattern, it's extraordinary because it's represented in less than 30% of the leadership interactions typically that you would see around you if you were an average person working in an average organization or in an average context. And it is that extraordinary leadership pattern because it's characterized by the presence of both strength and warmth together. And that seems extraordinary because most leaders trade one off against the other and fewer leaders seem to have found the capacity and the ability to bring both warmth and strength into their exercise of leadership.



 I call this pattern, this warm and strong leadership pattern as the catalyst style of leadership. And I call it catalyst style of leadership because what it is able to do is able to release the energy, the engagement, the contribution and the potential of other people. Just like in high school chemistry, you would have learned that a catalyst is something that you add to otherwise often inert substances and the addition of that small amount of something releases the energy, releases the potential and transforms those other materials.



 So it's so too does catalyst leadership through the presence of both warmth and strength.



 So catalyst leadership, this warm and strong pattern of leadership is focused on both tasks and relationships. It's not an either or proposition, it's tasks and relationships. And in fact, the magic in this is the realization, the understanding that this behavior represents the opportunity to produce results, outcomes, goals, objectives through people to its results through people, not results or people. Here are some examples of how this warmth and strength is brought together when exercising this pattern of leadership. So being receptive and assertive is a signature of this pattern. Receptivity is the willingness to listen to and to be open to ideas and opinions and points of view from other people. But it is also assertive, so it is able to assert itself when it has a view, it will argue its view or put its view candidly, forthrightly and strongly.



 It's a pattern of behavior which empowers but also holds people accountable. So the warmth shows up through its willingness to provide people with the latitude and the choice and the autonomy to make decisions and use their initiative. But it also at the same time exercises strength by holding people accountable for results, for producing the outcomes that matter. It combines warmth and strength by being empathetic and acting with resolve.



 Jacinda Ardern provided a good example of this during initial stages of the COVID lockdowns and the responses in New Zealand government to the emergence of COVID.



 In one press conference when they just decided to start locking down large parts of New Zealand, particularly Auckland, she demonstrated really strong empathy and compassion and said to people that she understood that this would be very difficult for them, that this would be very hard to not have that direct contact with people that we care about, people that we love, our families and our friends. But she also at the same time acted with resolve when she went on to say, but this is important, this is important action that we must take if we are to keep each other safe and healthy.



 And so the combination of both empathy and compassion with fierce resolve to make something happen that was quite difficult and asked people to do something which was quite difficult.



 Another example of the genius of this catalyst leadership that it can combine warmth and strength is through feedback. So it seeks feedback. The warmth is it asks other people to provide feedback about its own behavior, about what that leader does, which is helpful or what that leader does, which is unhelpful. But it also gives feedback. So it is prepared to give feedback to others because it wants them to grow, wants them to develop, believes that they can contribute more.



 Another example of the combination of warmth and strength comes through this acting with humility whilst taking up authority. So acting with humility, not believing that it has all the answers, not believing that it is the smartest person in the room and that others have something really important to offer.



 And at the same time, though, being willing to take up its authority, so take up its positional authority, its power to then make things happen, to exercise its authority, to provide direction or order or protection. All of these being examples and a limited set of examples about how this catalyst pattern of leadership is extraordinary in its ability to combine both warmth and strength in relatively close proximity to each other through that leader's behavior.



 If there is one extraordinary pattern of leadership behavior, then there must be three ordinary patterns of leadership behavior.



 And these are the other three patterns, these other combinations of strength or warmth. They're characterized typically by an absence of strength or an absence of warmth or an absence of both strength and warmth in the leader's behavior. And unfortunately, more than 70 percent of the leadership interactions that you're likely to experience are going to reflect these three patterns.



 And unfortunately, they produce inferior engagement, so they engage us less, they energize us less, they mobilize us less effectively. And unfortunately, they produce inferior results. And again, I'll talk about some of the research around this a bit later on and why that is. But let's talk about the first ordinary pattern of leadership, which is leadership behavior which is both strong but lacks warmth. So it is strong yet disconnected. We call this the control pattern. It's a pattern which seeks to take control of other people to produce outcomes and in doing so often places the task before people and focuses on results through its own efforts rather than the efforts of others.



 So what are some of the behaviors you might see? So when you see micromanaging behavior, which is very high control, very high agency, very high strength seeking to exert its influence to the finest detail about what other people are doing and how they're going about doing it.



 Telling people as the default. So there's nothing wrong with telling others what they should do or to share important information with others. However, when it becomes a default and it's only telling without asking or seeking, this would be high strength and low warmth behavior. The control pattern. The control pattern is also close to other people's views. Its views are the most important and it's quite comfortable putting its own views out there repeatedly and even more loudly when it's challenged. But typically doesn't seek others views. And when it is listening to others views, it typically is judging those views in the moment and just waiting to the other person stop speaking to tell that other person that their views are wrong, inferior or not as effective as their views.



 It will often become aggressive when it is challenged and often when challenged will dial up the tension, dial up its agency, dial up its strength in order to win, usually at the other person's expense. So typical outcomes of this control pattern of leadership is the leader wins and others lose.



 It's very easy at this point, though, to move to stereotypes about control leadership, to see it as being this awful nefarious self-serving version of leadership that is about the tyrant, the autocrat.



 That may be true. There are some very sort of strong and clear examples of this. I think an examination of Donald Trump's behavior would, for the most part, yield a conclusion that his behavior is very high on strength and lower on connection. In fact, even his language he uses and has used the word strong. You got to be strong repeatedly. Very rarely would use the warmth, the terms about connection or community or love or anything which says there is an us. It's typically about him.



 Another very public example in Australia, and I draw again from politics because politicians are very accessible to all of us. We get to see their behavior regularly in the press and in the media, would be the former Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison. Now, a book has been even written about his style of leadership and it's called Bulldozer because Scott Morrison described himself and his own version of leadership as being a bulldozer version of leadership. That once he decides on something, he goes after it in a really committed sense. Now, that's his version. What others are likely to experience that he would then go after things without consultation, without invitation, without accommodation of other people's views. He would, with fierce resolve, go after something but without necessarily the engagement or the humility which allows other people to be involved.



 It is important, though, for me to state that these are not opinions based on a party political position or a bias that I have for or against any political party. These are simple factual observations of leadership behavior that you and I have equal access to through both the media and through the reports and factual accounts of Scott Morrison's leadership style.



 It's also true that you or I are entirely capable of exhibiting this pattern of behavior at any point in time. Most of us have had the experience that when we're not getting what we want, we might start to speak more loudly and stop listening to the other person. In that moment, it's quite possible that our behavior has become strong and agentic, but we have lost our warmth. We're no longer listening to or acknowledging the other person in that no longer conversation, but now in an argument. It's also entirely true that we've dialed up our strength and dialed down our warmth and potentially moved into this pattern of leadership when we felt frustrated, when we felt annoyed with someone else who's not doing what we want them to do. This can easily happen as a parent when you have children who repeatedly are not doing what you might want them to do, which might be to go to bed or to brush their teeth or to do something.



 It's very easy to move into this high strength, low warmth pattern of leadership.



 In doing so, we're acknowledging that this pattern of leadership is not a leadership character, it's not a type of leader. It's a pattern of leadership behavior that you or I or anyone else in any moment in time can potentially move into it. It's just that some of us might have a greater tendency, a greater proclivity to do it more frequently, to do it more acutely, to do it more habitually.



 So that's the first of the three ordinary patterns of leadership control, high strength, low warmth. Let's look at what often people think about as the opposite pattern of leadership because it produces something very different. It creates a very different experience for those of us when we experience it in others. That is leadership behavior, which is high in warmth, but low in strength. So it's quite passive. This is behavior which is clearly signaling that people matter and that results matter less than people. So it's people before results. And if it's forced to have to prioritize those two things, it will clearly prioritize people over results. And in doing so, may sometimes give up. This behavior is giving up on producing an outcome in order to preserve the connection with other people. So it's therefore relationship over task.



 So what might be some good examples of this high warmth, low strength behavior? So when someone agrees too readily, too easily, that's high warmth, low strength. They're not taking a position on something that they might believe is important. Instead, they might submit to your view or submit to the group view and just go along.



 High warmth, low strength. Sometimes that behavior does it to avoid conflict. And so whenever you see behavior, which rather than using conflict productively and examining the differences between people's points of view or opinions or feelings, this behavior avoids that tension. It tries to remove the tension by smoothing things over or sugarcoating or trying to sweep things under the carpet. It therefore makes this pattern of leadership quite difficult to make progress with performance management because it often is uncomfortable holding the tension of a difficult conversation with someone else.



 This pattern of behavior might also be unfocused. So when you've got behavior which is wanting to connect to other people but isn't really focused on an outcome or making something happen, it can talk about anything, anything at all, because it's just about connecting. So it's often unfocused and it may meander. High warmth, low strength behavior can head in any direction because there is no outcome. There is no goal. There is no objective. There's nothing to anchor the behavior towards something so it can be quite unfocused and meandering. And you may have worked with this sort of style of leadership before, this pattern of leadership with other people who move to this behavior quite frequently and quite regularly. In fact, you yourself might find that you have your own tendency towards warmth rather than strength and you might show up with this pattern yourself. We'll talk about the implications of it a bit further on in this podcast, but this is a pattern again, a pattern of behavior that any of us are capable of moving towards in our leadership. So for example, the moment we decide that it's better or easier, more convenient to just agree even though we might disagree, or to just nod and say yes and smile because that's just easier than actually to hold a position or to argue a point of view, we may have chosen deliberately to move in towards this pattern of behavior.



 And the third ordery pattern is what we call protect and protect is interesting because it's characterized by an absence of both strength and warmth. So it is neither making anything happen or exerting its influence in the world around it through action, nor is it actually showing any signs of connection to other people or that other people exist.



 This pattern we call protect because often this pattern of behavior is one that we adopt consciously or non-consciously because in that moment we don't have trust of other people. There's it's characterized or driven by low trust. And what we're trying to do is to limit risk because if we engage with the world or we engage with other people, it carries with it some sense of risk. So what do you see when you see low warmth and low strength? Well, you don't really see much at all, actually. You're often left when you observe this behavior, you are left wondering what does this person really think because they're not declaring anything. What is this person really feeling because they're not showing anything through their body or on their face or through their words or their tone. They're just not giving you much at all. They're aloof or they're unresponsive.



 And the inaction of their behavior and the lack of connection of their behavior signals to us this low warmth and low strength.



 So it's behavior that might be unresponsive and it can be quite resistant to change because this behavior is not going to engage proactively with change and in fact can resist change. But it doesn't actively resist it in constructively engaging in a conversation about the change. It comes up with reasons why it should resist or why that change is bad without coming up with an alternative, without coming up with a way of constructively moving forward. And so often when we encounter behavior which is cynical and blaming, we see that as this protect pattern of behavior, low strength and low warmth.



 Behavior which is saying to us, you don't matter, other people don't matter, only I matter. And it's behavior though that is not engaging with other people or engaging with a problem or an opportunity in a active way.



 So that's the fourth pattern of leadership, the protect pattern. So now we think about it. We've got these four different patterns of leadership, each of them characterized by a combination of these two ingredients. We've got catalyst behavior which is strong and warm. We have the control pattern which is high strength but low warmth. We have the relate pattern which is high warmth with low strength. And then we have the protect behavior which is about the presence of low warmth and low strength simultaneously in that person's behavior.



 At this point, it's worthwhile you stopping for a moment just reflecting on your own behavior.



 Now that I've explained these four different patterns, it's useful to engage in self-inquiry and simply ask yourself, what's my tendency towards strength or warmth? Do I have a bias or a predisposition to one of those two things? And if so, which is it?



 And where does that show up? Under what circumstances in particular will you see that bias?



 If you feel that you for the most part show up with both strength and warmth in your leadership, a useful follow-up question might be, under what circumstance do I find myself losing my warmth and becoming high strength control? Or in what circumstances do I lose my strength and my behavior becomes much more about warmth and connection and relatedness?



 And even under what circumstances do I find myself losing both my strength and warmth? And do I notice my own behavior moving into that protect pattern of leadership?



 Take a moment now to do that. And when we come back, we'll examine the implications of each of these different patterns of leadership.



 I made the statement earlier on that the presence of both strength and warmth is a characteristic or a red thread that runs through all of the research that I've read that makes the difference between ordinary and more extraordinary leadership.



 The question that we should be asking now is why is that? What is it about warmth and strength together that allows for more effective leadership? Part of the answer lies in going back to our definition of leadership. You recall that we asserted that leadership is about influencing and mobilizing other people to do what needs to be done.



 So in some way, the presence of both strength and warmth in a leader's behavior must therefore be more effective at influencing and mobilizing other people to do what needs to be done. Perhaps part of this is understanding that for leadership to be effective, there must be followership. That is, that for someone to show up with an agenda for something or a desire to produce something that might be a goal, a mission, an outcome, a purpose, produce some kind of vision or just simply drive an outcome to a task or an objective, that to do so would require other people to be willing to get on board with that leader's agenda or with that leader's agenda.



 And that is true. What does the science tell us about the impact of both strength and warmth in a leader's behavior on their ability to engender followership mindsets and followership behaviors and followership contributions from others?



 In my investigation of the social sciences research into the impact of strength and warmth, I found a fascinating study, which was reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2007. In this paper, the researchers reported on some experiments that they had run. These experiments were done in the last few years.



 So a fundamental premise of this research was that all of us have a brain which produces conscious thoughts and feelings and actions. However, they are often being dictated or shaped or driven by the brain.



 And this is really just simply a consequence of the way in which our brains are structured to the point now where psychologists will say that often our conscious mind is merely an observer to what our non-conscious has already decided.



 So if the underlying premise is that beneath our awareness and beyond our control, automatically, instantaneously and habitually, our mind takes in data from our senses and it makes decisions about things and then presents our conscious mind with the outcome of that decision. That is, do we like this person or not like this person, for example, or do we agree with this point of view or disagree with this point of view, for example, or do we feel good about this or bad about this, for example, that those non-conscious decisions or tendencies can actually be measured in this quite sophisticated social science experiment. That the decisions that are made by our non-conscious cognition within milliseconds can actually be measured. In this particular experiment, the initial feelings or predispositions towards particular emotions or feelings that would arise in someone's brain were able to be measured very quickly when the individual or the subject was exposed to different combinations of strength and warmth. Generally, when the test subjects were presented with behavior which was warm but not strong, the typical emotion or the bias of their brain was towards a feeling of pity. And it's advised that this is because when we experience other people who are warm and likeable, however, are not particularly agentic or competent, that is low in strength, that we will feel pity for them. So we feel something that is not as good as we are. So we feel something for them because of their warmth. We want to feel something for them, something which is empathetic and compassionate. But at the same time, we pity them because their absence of agency or strength or competence leaves them a little bit helpless in the world, hence our feeling of pity. The typical emotion or the bias in our emotion towards someone whose behavior was both absent of strength and absent of warmth, therefore was passive and disconnected, was one of contempt. This is fascinating and the researchers surmised that this was because when we experience other people who do not take up agency or action in the world to try and influence the world around them to create the conditions that they might want or the outcomes that they might want, nor do they in any way connect with other people or connect with us, then we don't feel anything positive towards them, any sort of positive affect towards them. We're going to feel negatively towards them and negatively towards their helplessness. And so the feeling of contempt was most likely.



 So what did the researchers find was the typical bias or emotion that is going to be produced in our mind within milliseconds towards someone whose behavior is strong, but not warm, that is strong and disconnected.



 Interestingly, it was envy or resentment or jealousy.



 We can assume that this is because when people show up with agency and strength and competence, they're often going to get what they want from the world. And that usually means rewards. It means they get decisions in their favor. It means that they get material gains that are in their favor. And so they accrue status and they accrue material gains and they accrue rewards. But at the same time, their lack of warmth towards other people, their lack of connection towards us, means that we're not going to feel positively towards their attention. So we're likely to feel resentful or envious or jealous of their achievement. And I think this is what in Australia is behind what we call the tall poppy syndrome. When successful people in our society show up and have achieved a lot, that if they show up and they appear egotistical and self-serving and kind of getting above the pack, then we want to cut them down.



 Well, at least that's one possible reason for that typical cultural expression and behavior that we have. It may also explain how we feel typically or what the science says we're likely to feel in our non-conscious towards people who are both strong and warm. So we now have got this unique combination of strength and warmth. And the most frequent likely feeling that is to emerge in our non-conscious and therefore influence from that moment forward how we feel about that person and how we're likely to react to that person is a feeling of admiration.



 Because we admire people who are able to influence the world around them, to be a gente, to be competent, to actually influence and shape the experience they're having of the world to achieve things. And because they're likeable, because they are warm towards us, they recognize our existence, we're much more likely to admire them and want to maybe even be like them. I call this the Hugh Jackman effect. I'd always wondered why it was that with someone like Hugh Jackman, why we'd never wanted to cut Hugh Jackman down, that he was exempt or immune from the tall poppy effect because there's clearly someone who's been very successful in his career as a as an actor, both on Broadway and in Hollywood, as a producer and a director.



 Yet we want him to be even more successful as a general rule. And that's because he shows up with very high likeability, very high warmth, humility. He can be very competent and capable, but he shows up with humility and does not appear at all to be egotistical or arrogant. And hence we're much more likely to feel admiration towards him. The Hugh Jackman effect.



 These insights that these non-conscious but nonetheless powerful feelings or thoughts we have about others when they show up with these different combinations of warmth and strength can also start to explain why we are likely to support or get on board with the leadership or the agendas of other people. And this is perhaps some of the most important research around why these different patterns of strength and warmth have an impact on our ability to engage and mobilize and influence other people.



 Again, I'm going to refer to some particularly nifty social science or social cognition research, which was reported in the Trends in Cognitive Sciences journal.



 What the researchers found was that when we respond to a leader or their leaders agenda, there's a range of responses that people can have. And it can range from very active support and engagement right through to quite active harm and sabotage. And if you think about it as a continuum and at the positive end, at the engaged end, people can actively engage and go out of their way to help the leader achieve what's important to them and help that leader be successful. If we move down the continuum away from that very active engagement, the next stop might be, let's call it passive support. That is that we will support that leader if it's convenient for us to do so. If we don't have to go out of our way to support them or to support their agenda, we will. So it's still engagement, it's still support, but it's not discretionary. It's convenient. As we move down the continuum, we're moving into these areas in which we're no longer supporting the leader or that leader's agenda. And the first stop is going to be a more mild form of non-support. We'll call this passive harm. And that is that we will likely neglect that leader's agenda or that leader.



 We're not going to go out of our way to harm them, but if we were to see that leader or what they're trying to achieve come across a roadblock or be harmed in some way, we might not go out of our way to help them. And the analogy is that if we were to see a leader or their agenda about to be hit by a bus, we would probably let them be hit by a bus. We wouldn't step into harm's way ourselves to help them. At the very end of that support continuum, we're now in territory of where people will go out of their way to actively harm the leader or their agenda. And they'll actually, in the simple words, will sabotage that leader's prospects or the agenda that they're driving.



 In other words, using the analogy of the bus, this is a situation where we're likely to push the other person in front of the bus to make sure that they get harmed. So we've got this range of responses in our willingness to support a leader or their agenda, which range from very active engagement right through to very active harm.



 The leader's behavior, if we were to characterize it by the presence of strength and warmth or the absence of strength and warmth, has a profound effect upon our willingness to support their agenda. And what the research showed was that leaders who showed up with that control pattern, which is high strength, low warmth, that our responses to them ranged from passive support, that is, that we'll support them if it's convenient for us. But would range possibly right down into passive harm and active harm. That is, that we would go out of our way to harm them and their agenda. And it's quite possible that the earlier research that I shared before about our feelings of jealousy and resentment, or even envy towards leaders who have that high strength but low warmth, may be the cause of that, that willingness to harm them or to allow them to come to harm.



 What the research was very clear on was that upper end of support, that active engagement, where people will go out of their way and apply discretionary effort to support the leader and or their agenda. That was not part of the typical response to the control leadership pattern, that high strength and low warmth does not generate active engagement of other people.



 The relate pattern was interesting. So that high warmth, low strength, it did produce to some extent active engagement from followers, or is likely to produce passive support and convenience cooperation. But it also had the capacity to produce passive harm. That is, if we see that leader or their agenda being at harm or being at risk of harm, that we wouldn't go out of our way to help them avoid that particular negative outcome. And that perhaps the feeling of pity that we have towards others who are high warmth but low strength at times might promote that response.



 Again, we have a third ordinary pattern of leadership, and that's the low warmth, low strength, protect pattern. It's protective, it's unresponsive, it's closed, it doesn't engage with problems or opportunities and it doesn't engage with people.



 This produced in this research the clearest absence of support from other people. In other words, it produced the least amount of engagement and influence and mobilization of other people. And it typically ranged from passive harm right through to active harm.



 But we've got one pattern of leadership left, the catalyst pattern, high strength, high warmth.



 And it, fascinatingly, produced only engagement. It not only produced passive support, that is, people conveniently cooperating, but it was the only pattern that would consistently produce active engagement and help.



 It would encourage discretionary effort from other people towards supporting the leader's agenda and supporting the leader themselves. I had an experience of coaching a leader a few years ago, which was a perfect illustration of some of these findings. This leader was very clearly competent, a very capable leader operating in a CEO role running a significant business unit. And there was a period in which that leader was subject to a series of internal investigations. Someone had actually claimed that they had done something, which in fact the investigation later reported that they had.



 But during that period of time, that leader received very little support from his peers. That is, the people who were heading up the other business units and heading up some of the corporate functions. And he felt quite negative about that, that no one had provided him actively with support. No one had gone out of their way to check in on him and to see whether he was okay or not during that long protracted investigation.



 And he felt resentful towards him because of that. After a period of time when we did a whole bunch of work to help him examine his behaviour, he realised why that was. Most of the time he was showing up when he was with his peers in that control mode. Very high strength, very high competence, very high agency. Didn't really invest much time in connecting to his peers, didn't really send them any signals that they were worthwhile or they were valued or valuable. Didn't often seek their opinion, didn't listen carefully to what they were saying and try and incorporate their views into his sense making of the world.



 He was being experienced as high strength, low warmth, that is the control pattern. And it perfectly explained that when he was at risk of harm through that investigation, why no one went out of their way to support him. And he realised that if he wanted to produce and cultivate the engagement and support of other people for him and his leadership agenda, he needed to introduce a lot more warmth into his behaviour, which then became his work.



 So through this research we start to develop a very clear picture of what is the impact of the different patterns of strength and warmth on our ability to influence and mobilise other people. And the social sciences are really now just catching up with what the management sciences have reported for quite some time.



 That strength and warmth produce better outcomes, it's just that we never understood the mechanics of why that was. We now have much better insight into that. There is now also plenty of research beyond the social sciences in the management sciences, which shows that these combinations of strength and warmth produce not just more effective leadership, but produce better business outcomes.



 And you can look into the work of Collins around good to great as a simple example of that. So in Jim Collins' work he examined what is it that allowed some companies to move from being good to great, that is they were able to outperform their peers and achieve better market leading positions over longer periods of time. And in their examination of the ingredients that were necessary to do that, they found that these organisations were typically headed up by what he called level five leaders. And level five leaders were characterised by what he termed this paradox, this combination of these two things which seemed to be opposites.



 And he summarised them as the combination of humility and fierce resolve.



 And when we think about it through our language of warmth and strength, humility and fierce resolve are really just representations of warmth and strength. Humility is warmth, when we show up with humility we are saying I'm not the important person here, other people are.



 And other people have something to offer and I don't have all the answers and there is likely to be in fact better answers from other people.



 But when we show up with fierce resolve, which is the strength part, the agency part, we are saying and at the same time I'm committed to producing an outcome, committed to achieving a goal, committed to making something happen here. But it doesn't all have to happen through me, that's the warmth part. And so Collins without realising it at the time had again found this red thread, this golden thread that runs through the research that I've seen which says that warmth and strength together.



 Produce quite extraordinary outcomes.



 I've also had the good fortune to work alongside or work with or just observe closely some leaders who understood that their ability to promote more warmth and strength in their own leadership behaviour and in the leaders around them could have extraordinary impact.



 Particularly in transforming the organisations they worked within or the systems in which they sought to exercise leadership. And I'll pick just three examples of this at scale.



 I think Jacinda Ardern is a good one from at a country level, at a society level, where she deliberately sought to not only demonstrate but cultivate more warmth in the society and more warmth in the way in which leaders in government made decisions and a greater attention to connection. But she never traded off strength in doing so. She never said that outcomes are not important, that making progress is not important, that producing things is not important. But she always made sure that it was not at the expense of people, that it was about finding a way in which we could combine this regard for people, the importance of connection, the importance of community, the importance of people with productivity and with outcomes and with the people.



 And she was very passionate about the fact that she was not with progress. At a personal level, she I think provided a powerful role model which had a significant impact around the world on people's conception of leadership. And she even spoke openly about the fact that she was criticised for being too compassionate, too empathetic and that people often misunderstood that when they saw that empathy and that compassion they assumed that she was not showing strength and competence.



 And she was very clear that she didn't believe that those two things could not coexist in the same space and time, that you can be a warm and compassionate and empathetic leader whilst being strong and competent and agentic. And I think her effectiveness and what she was able to achieve over the years that she was Prime Minister in New Zealand was testament to the strength of both or the capacity of both warmth and strength together.



 At another sort of fairly large scale, I saw this happen in a big organisation, BHP, which is typically considered one of Australia's most successful organisations over the longer term.



 This is an organisation which is very capable, employs very capable people, very smart people and has incredibly robust processes, ways of doing things, ways of thinking about things, ways of operating, which we would typically think is strength-related organisational capabilities. They're great at making things happen. Andrew McKenzie, who was the former CEO, for a period of time recognised that for the organisation to reach its full potential, it also needed to embrace warmth. It needed to build more warmth into its DNA. And he talked about the importance of trust and the importance of connection and the importance of conversation and sought to promote quite deliberately a leadership culture and a culture more broadly that led to the importance of trust.



 And that leveraged notions of trust and open communication and psychological safety where people could say what was really on their mind and what they were feeling, what they were really thinking was really psychological safety is a product of high warmth cultures. That if they could take that and put that together with their already existing strength, their discipline, their focus, their drive, their agency, that they could continue to transform themselves into quite an extraordinary organisation. And for many people who worked at PHP during that time who have had the opportunity to speak to, would all talk to the profoundly transformative effect that that culture had on their own engagement, their own contribution.



 And the results for that organisation over that period of time where they continue to drive a range of positive outcomes that related to metrics or measures around productivity and performance as well as people such as engagement would show that it was paying off and clearly paid off for that period of time. And then perhaps a third example that I could share with you where a leader understood intimately this notion that if you want to transform an organisation from something which is underperforming and an organisation that is not engaging and has not brought people in to the point where they feel motivated and mobilised and committed, that by introducing strength and warmth together into the leadership culture you could start to create a transformative environment in which performance was possible. That was during the period in which Coles, which had been fundamentally broken and written off by the analysts, went through this significant period of transformation led by Ian McLeod and a large group of very committed leaders where they deliberately sought to introduce both warmth and strength into their practice, that their leadership should be a combination of, in their language, empowering and involving people and at the same time challenging them to step up to a new level of engagement.



 And these were even higher levels to even greater contributions because they had that capacity, they had that potential, they had faith that they could make that contribution.



 And these are three simple but powerful examples. And to that point, what the researchers also started to make very clear now is that this seemingly paradoxical combination of warmth and strength, this genius of how do you show up with warmth and strength at the same time, not only has a catalytic effect, but it is necessary for transformative leadership to change systems. Some research by Torbett and Rook, Bill Torbett, the leadership guru who retired several years ago, did some research which found very clearly that when they looked at leaders who had the capacity for holding these two things, strength and warmth, together in the same space and time, that they were able to more successfully transform and change systems around them, change organizations. Whereas when they examined leaders who possess the mindsets which traded off strength and warmth or traded off these things as opposites, they were typically unable to lead transformations or those necessary changes in their organizations to ensure that they would be fit and remain fit and adapted to the challenges of their environments that they continue to succeed over the longer term. And their longitudinal studies of organizations and leaders over many decades continued to show conclusively that this was true.



 So there we have it folks, the case for extraordinary leadership. That extraordinary leadership is able to change and transform the systems around it and kind of start to create the world in which we want to live. This sort of version of leadership is extraordinary because it combines these two often what people see as paradoxically opposites. When they're not opposites, they are two things that if we can put together in the same space and time, produce a version of leadership,



 which is much more powerful at engaging and mobilizing and influencing other people, releasing their capacity, releasing their contribution, releasing their potential, which explains why if the function of leadership is to influence and mobilize other people and to energize them, why it is just much more effective to do it through the combination of strength and warmth.



 We've also established however, unfortunately, much of the leadership that we see and experience in the world around us is not a combination of strength and warmth. It's a trade off. It's the giving up of strength that's characterized by the strength of the people.



 The giving up of warmth or even the giving up of both. And importantly, we can recognize that we ourselves are sometimes subject to that, that trading off the tyranny of I have to give up strength or warmth or both.



 And that therefore our work, if we want to become the sorts of leaders that we want to experience in the world, or the sorts of leaders that we think we have the potential to be, or that we have purposes or visions or dreams or hopes that are big enough that we know we need to engage other people and release their full contribution, their full commitment, their full capability, then it's beholden on us to continue to work on how we can in our own practice every day, as consistently as we might, as masterful as we could,



 combine both warmth and strength into our practice of leadership.



 I hope that you've enjoyed this episode of the Xtraordinary Leaders podcast. I'm looking forward to sharing with you the next two episodes in which we can go beyond examining our own leadership and the leadership of others through the lens of strength and warmth.



 And start to ask ourselves, how can we practically start to show up with more strength and warmth in our leadership? And what might hold us back from being able to do that?



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