Closing the Gap

Thank you for subscribing to Mann on a Mission newsletter, which I write for servant leaders just like you, every couple of weeks. My mission is to address the Churn of Disconnection that's tearing us apart, propose best practices for bridging that Churn, and ways to get big sh*t done when nobody else is coming.

"The leadership has no idea what we are going through. It's like they live on a different planet. Do they even know what we go through every day?!"  I heard these words from some very experienced and seasoned mid-level managers during a recent meeting I facilitated as a consultant helping a large company through a tough merger and acquisition.

            When I shared the summary of these findings with the senior leadership team, one of the SVPs rolled her eyes and exclaimed, "My God, this never ends. What are we going to have to do to get through to these people? We've never had this kind of financial stress on the company and we need people to start stepping up!"

            There is a massive disconnect between the leaders and the led. Do you feel it?

            Since retiring from Army Special Forces, the Green Berets, almost 10 years ago, I've had the opportunity to take what I learned as a Green Beret, building trust in rough places by applying deep knowledge of the human operating system and old-school interpersonal skills, and teach that to civilians. It turns out that the same kind of distrust and disconnection that permeates the war-torn conflict areas I deployed to as a Green Beret, manifests deeply in corporate America, nonprofits, and our communities.

            Human nature is very primal and only the stakes differ between a modern-day corporate feud and a feud between cousins in rural Afghanistan.

            In teaching my unique approach to navigating the human operating system and human connection for more impact, I've had the opportunity to work at multiple levels across the private and public sectors in just about every industry, including defense, technology, medicine, manufacturing, finance, and all points in between. Through all of this, I've noticed a deep, palpable problem with internal trust inside organizations. 

            It's showing up as recruiting problems, retention issues, and the talent tsunami. It's showing up as emotional outbursts in the office and across our country where citizens don't trust the institutional leaders in politics, military, and other vital organizations like we once did. It's showing up in sessions where employees are voicing overt frustration with their leaders.

            What's going on? Why is there such a gap between the leaders and the led?

            This is certainly a more complex issue than a newsletter can solve, but I have seen three consistent trends that leaders can address to close these gaps dramatically. These are the three things I shared with those leaders going through that merger and I'll share them with you now: 

            (1) Lead yourself first. So many leaders today are trying to change everything around them but inside, they are a mess. My friend, Tim Spiker, who wrote the book, The Only Leaders Worth Following, makes a very bold and, in my opinion, accurate claim that the best leaders on the planet "are inwardly sound and others focused." My experience in combat, as well as corporate America, is that if you're not able to lead yourself, manage your own emotional temperature, and regulate your own anger, how can you possibly lead your family, your community, your business, or your nation? In these complex times, we have to work on ourselves first.

            We must develop a way of being in the world, that allows us to manage our emotional state and not drop into fight, flight, or freeze every time something goes wrong. We must learn how to utilize diaphragmatic breathing to stay in a parasympathetic state of calm and connect, versus being a passenger in the car of life and allowing our mobile devices, alerts, and other intrusions to dominate our emotional state. There's so much to be done here, but the aspect of being inwardly sound is a great metric to start with.

            What are the things that you should be doing daily that will allow you to level up your mind, body, and spirit toward full alignment and self-actualization of what you were put on this earth to do? Pursuing that strategic aim point of being inwardly sound is the first order of business for leaders at every level. From corporals in the Marine Corps to chief operating officers at billion-dollar technology companies, failure to be inwardly sound simply projects your baggage onto those around you and creates an unsafe environment.

            (2) Be relatable. "Do they even know what we go through every day?" I hear this question so much, across every industry. So many well-intended leaders are not relatable to the pain of the people they serve. They've lost touch with the arena where the action takes place. There is a necessary distance that goes with leadership, but it doesn't have to inhibit human connection. There are ways to bridge this.

            I once coached a president of a major financial company. Her people simply did not get her. They didn't understand where she was coming from. At one of her leadership conferences, I encouraged her to share a story I had previously heard her talk about regarding her mother's mental health. She did, and the level of connection that she developed in that room almost instantaneously was astounding. Her story of that scared young girl trying to help navigate her mother's mental health crisis and all of the effects it had on her years later, helped the people in that room understand what this leader was about. They developed a sense of themselves as meaning-seeking creatures. They were able to make and assign meaning through a narrative that wasn't there before.

            This leader accelerated trust by simply repurposing one of her struggles into a narrative in the service of the people she led. This is what I call the generosity of scars, putting stories into the world in the service of others from the scars that we encountered along the way. We're social creatures. We crave leaders we can relate to.

            There's lots of talk about being vulnerable, and I think that's good, but as a social creature, I'm much more in favor of being relatable. In the moment that your teenage daughter comes to you upset about being left out of an Instagram chat, before you roll your eyes thinking it's some trivial issue, ask yourself, am I relatable to her right now? Am I relatable to her pain? Am I an empathetic witness to what she's going through? Does she see that I get her? Just those actions alone will ensure that you bring the right levels of empathy, vulnerability, and all of those beautifully human aspects that are innate within us at the moment they are most needed.

            (3) Be relevant. The final element that can close the gap between leaders and the led is relevance. I've found that most leaders have a hard time being relevant to the goals of the people they serve. There are lots of reasons for this.

            It doesn't help that we live in an attention-based, transactional economy that is manipulated by divisionist leaders and engineered by shortsighted folks who understand our primal realities and often leverage them to create anger, contempt, and in/out groups so that they can curate our attention.

            That might seem extreme but take a breath and look around you. Look at social media. Look at the 24/7 news. Look at how people are treating each other at holiday tables over election topics. Leaders are not seeking relevance.

            We are social creatures. It's primal. We navigate the world not because we have fur, fangs, and claws, but because of our unique ability to form teams and collectives to overcome tough situations.

            We're also meaning-seeking creatures. We seek and assign meaning in everything that we do. As such, humans operate off the pursuit of goals. Goals are at the heart of negotiations according to Professor Stuart Diamond. Leaders who position themselves in a place of relevance, oriented on the goals of the other party, are the ones we will follow to hell and back.

            If we can make the goals of the other party a priority and commit ourselves to being as relevant as we can in helping the other party achieve those goals, the biological reality of reciprocity kicks in and suddenly we have harnessed the deep and primal aspects of human dynamics that have been around for time immortal.

            And here is the good news...Those ancient, innate emotional needs are still with us; they've only been buried by mass technology. If we simply make the goals of the other party our priority and pursue relevance to those goals with the pure intention of discovery, curiosity, and fulfillment, we will activate levers that open new doors we never imagined.

            I'll wrap up with this: These three things seem simple, but I assure you they are not easy. I learned them from my parents, Rex and Anita Mann. I reinforced them in jungles and deserts around the world with downtrodden people trying to stand up on their own against oppression, and I've crafted them into a methodology of art and science that I call Rooftop Leadership in the last 10 years of my post-military life. I encourage you to try these out.

            Look, there will always be a natural tension between the folks who give the orders and those who take them. But the gap between the leaders and the led doesn't have to run our businesses and communities into the dirt. We can close the gap. We don't need permission from above to do that. We can even lead up and model this behavior for leaders above us to ultimately do the right thing.

            We live in challenging times where the gaps are often wide. But you can close that leadership gap by leading yourself, being relatable to the pain, and relevant to the goals of those you serve.

            Until next time, I'll see you on the Rooftop!

            P.S.

            In my upcoming book, Nobody is Coming to Save You: A Green Berets Guide to Getting Big Sh*t Done, which releases on October 1st, these elements are further discussed as they are central components of the Rooftop Leadership methodology. But these three tips should keep you going while you pre-order the book and prepare yourself to lead more authentically and more effectively than you ever have.