216. Intentional Leadership: Mastering the Inner Game with Mick Spiers

Unlock the secrets behind intentional and adaptive leadership. 

This episode promises to equip you with the foundational habits essential for mastering advanced leadership skills, akin to an athlete strengthening their core. Discover the power of showing up with purpose, understanding when to take charge or step back, and how intentionality can redefine your leadership journey. We discuss situational and adaptive leadership, emphasizing the importance of tailoring strategies to meet diverse needs and business contexts. Learn why allowing your team to face challenges is crucial for building resilience and how managing work intensity can drive true efficiency. Plus, delve into the expectancy effect and its role in setting positive expectations to help your team members thrive.

Chapters

• 0:01 Leadership Reflections and Adaptive Strategies
• 14:24 Enhancing Leadership Through Multimedia Platforms

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:01

As a leader, do you know when to step in or when to step back? Today's episode of the Leadership Project is going to be a solo cast where I reflect on the great interview with Christian Muntean about training to lead, where we covered a lot about being intentional as a leader and applying situational leadership and adaptive leadership. I'm also going to share my reflections about the power of expectations and perception and about building resilience through controlled struggle and self-management. Sit back and enjoy the show. Hey everyone, and welcome back to the Leadership Project. Today's episode is a solo cast reflecting on my conversation with Christian Muntean. If you haven't listened to episode 215 yet, I highly recommend that you check it out. It's packed with insights on leadership habits, adaptive strategies and so much more. As I reflect on my talk with Christian, several themes stood out that I think every leader should consider. First, christian's concept of training to lead by focusing on foundational habits before tackling advanced skills, resonated with me deeply. It's similar to how athletes train. The concept is to master the basics before performing at an elite level. We often promote individuals based on technical skills or even charisma, but we seldom prepare them for the specific skills of leadership and, as Christian emphasized, leadership is more than a title. It's about influence and the ability to empower others.

Mick Spiers: 1:51

Christian talked a lot about intentionality. How do we show up as leaders and this is something I'm personally passionate about when we, as leaders, start each day with a clear sense of purpose, asking ourselves how can I show up today to serve my team? What will serve me well, what will serve the team well? What will serve the organization well, we can completely change our approach to challenges. Christian highlighted the importance of checking our motivations, highlighted the importance of checking our motivations To think about before we take actions and thinking about are we going to step in here? Are we going to step out? What action are we going to take? We need to think about whether we're doing it for the team or whether we're doing it for ourselves. Are we stepping in because the team need guidance or because we feel insecure? This self-awareness is crucial and this is where intentional leadership helps us focus on what the team truly needs Know what our own fears are and to know what our motivation is before we take that action, and to know what our motivation is before we take that action. This brings me to the concept of situational leadership and adaptive leadership that Christian and I discussed. Every team, every person and every situation calls for a unique approach. So you need to be able to read the room and adapt your leadership style. Christian shared the idea of learned helplessness, where team members may come to rely too heavily on a directive leader. It's a great reminder for us to empower rather than overstep, allowing people to scrape their knees sometimes and learn from their mistakes. So always thinking about adaptive leadership.

Mick Spiers: 3:49

Adaptive leadership is adapting to the individual. What does the individual need? You're not going to lead a 30-year veteran in your industry the same way that you might lead an intern. They have different needs. That you might lead an intern. They have different needs. And then the situational leadership comes to.

Mick Spiers: 4:08

What situation is the team in the business in? It might be the phase that the business is in. Are we in a rapid growth phase or are we in a phase where we need to step in and control some costs for a period of time? So the situation it might be a crisis. If it's a crisis situation, we are going to step in more. If it's business as usual, we're going to step back more. So, adapting to the situation, adapting to the person, building on this, christian stressed the value of sometimes letting that team struggle. This can be a very hard pill to swallow as a leader, because your natural tendency is you want to step in. You want to rescue the team from obstacles or mistakes. You don't like to see them make mistakes, but they'll learn so much more if you allow them to struggle a little bit and they become more independent rather than dependent on you all the time for the answers. Christian's perspective is that leaders need to let their teams experience those challenges sometimes even fail, as part of their own growth process. By letting them face and overcome difficulties on their own, they build resilience, they build problem-solving skills and they develop self-reliance within the team. If we're constantly stepping in, we're not just solving the issue. We're preventing them from growing into stronger, more capable leaders themselves.

Mick Spiers: 5:46

Another powerful takeaway was Christian's perspective on intensity. Just as athletes know when to push and when to rest, leaders need to manage the intensity in their work. Corporate culture often values what he calls pseudo-productivity, where putting in long hours is celebrated over true efficiency and effectiveness. As Christian pointed out, we must know when to push and when to pull back, creating sustainable, high-impact work habits. He emphasized the importance of creating rhythms in your work, knowing when to dial up the focus and when to rest and recharge. Imagine how much more effective our teams could be if we, as leaders, role modeled this balance. When you think about it, an Olympic athlete does not train at 100% intensity every moment of every day, and yet in the corporate world, we seem to have developed this thought that if you're not working hard, you're not working hard enough. Sometimes you do need to rest, recharge the batteries, clear the mind, and then afterwards you'll be more productive, more decisive and make better decisions.

Mick Spiers: 7:08

Another concept Christian shared that truly resonated with me was the Pygmalion effect, or the expectancy effect, also sometimes called the halo effect and the horns effect. This is the idea that people tend to rise or fall to the level of expectation set for them. Christian shared the study where students working with two sets of rats believed that one group was high performing and the other was low performing and, despite being the exact same rats, the so-called high performers actually performed better because of the students' expectations. Imagine the impact this expectancy effect has in the workplace.

Mick Spiers: 7:52

When we, as leaders, set expectations for our team members, believing in their potential, they are more likely to reach a high potential if we're looking for high potential. Conversely, if we assume limitation in others, we unintentionally reinforce those limits. It's like a massive confirmation bias where we start seeing all the things that we're looking for. If we're looking for high performance, we'll see high performance. If we're looking for, if we're looking for high performance, we'll see high performance. If we're expecting low performance and we're looking for low performance, we'll see all of the signs that reinforce what we already believe. So when we believe certain things about ourselves, about others or even life itself, we naturally start seeing the things that confirm those beliefs and not seeing the things that might contradict that belief. Think of it this way If we believe a team member isn't capable, we'll notice every small mistake as proof and ignore their accomplishments. Or if we see ourselves as limited by circumstances, we'll only notice obstacles and never see the opportunities.

Mick Spiers: 9:13

Christian's insight here challenges us to reflect on our own expectations and assumptions, asking ourselves am I seeing the full picture or am I only seeing what I expect to see? As I integrate these thoughts into my own leadership approach, it also reminds me of the amazing work of Timothy Galway on the inner game. Timothy, or Tim, always positions that performance is potential minus interference. Christian's guidance on self-management on habit building and removing interference aligns perfectly with this idea. Whether it's going for a walk in the sun to reset, setting an intention for the day or simply building in moments of reflection for the day or simply building in moments of reflection, these are habits that lead to high performance and resilience, working on our potential whilst removing the elements of interference in our mind. I also found Christian's take on prioritizing self-management habits incredibly valuable. He shared that high-level executives often come back to foundational basics like energy management, prioritizing tasks and follow-through intentional habits.

Mick Spiers: 10:35

It's not only about advanced strategies or technical skills. Sometimes the real game changer is having the discipline to stick to healthy routines, knowing when to intensify focus, to turn up the dial to 11 and when to step back. And Christian's approach to habits and conditioning in leadership speaks volumes about the importance of preparation, self-awareness and managing one's own inner game before trying to lead others. It makes me think of the three dimensions of leadership. They are leading ourselves, leading others and leading the business. And when we're making decisions, when we're taking actions, when we're deciding how we're going to show up, we're asking ourselves the question is this going to serve me well? Is it going to serve the team well. Is it going to serve the business well?

Mick Spiers: 11:35

Another point Christian raised was about building resilience through adversity. It's not just about managing day-to-day stress, but developing the capacity to handle bigger challenges without burnout. Leadership is rarely a smooth path, and by conditioning ourselves to push through moments of discomfort we build that resilience. It's about striking a balance, just like most athletes do, between high performance periods and deliberate recovery. Are we setting aside time for both high intensity, focus and rest to build that intensity and to build that resilience? Rest to build that intensity and to build that resilience.

Mick Spiers: 12:21

So, as you go about your day today, I encourage you to reflect on Christian's lessons. How can you be more intentional with your leadership? Where can you step back and allow your team to grow, and what daily habits can you introduce to manage your own inner game as a leader? The key takeaways for me intentional leadership. How am I going to show up? Situational leadership, adapting to the situation. Adaptive leadership, adapting to the individual. To really think about this power of expectations and perceptions, am I letting the Pygmalion effect and confirmation bias shape what I expect and what I see? And then building resilience through controlled struggle and self-management about when to turn the dial up, when to turn the dial back. These are things that can help us become a high performance leader. So that's it for today.

Mick Spiers: 13:27

In the next episode of the Leadership Project, I'm going to be joined by the controversial GS Youngblood and we're going to talk about a topic that can be quite divisive. We're going to talk about toxic masculinity and the modern definition of what it means to be a male in the workplace and in relationships. I'm certain that's going to cause some division in people. It's going to cause people to stop and think and it's a very emotive topic, but it's a discussion that we need to have. We need to have an understanding of what it means to be a male in a modern world and how we can redefine modern masculinity in a way that ditches some of the older stereotypes but builds a new model of what it means to be a man.

Mick Spiers: 14:24

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