338. The Leadership Ecosystem: Creating the Conditions for People to Grow with Mick Spiers

Most leadership advice assumes people are fixed and organizations are machines. We don’t buy that. People change, teams adapt, and every interaction leaves a trace, which is why we’re using a garden metaphor to tie together the biggest lessons from Antoniette Roze, Ron Friedman, and Frans Campher. When leadership is a living ecosystem, your job is not to “control the machine,” it’s to tend the conditions where trust, clarity, and good work can grow.

We start with communication as planting: the difference between having an idea and helping someone receive it. If you’ve ever explained something “clearly” and still met confusion or resistance, the problem may be soil, not seed. We dig into generative listening, how people interpret messages through history and emotion, and how real co-creation happens when input can actually shape outcomes.

Then we zoom out to team performance and team productivity. Individual optimization does not guarantee collective performance, especially when focus time becomes someone else’s bottleneck. We walk through what a high-performing team needs: shared goals people understand, role clarity that prevents waiting, and interdependence that matches how work really flows. Along the way, we bring in behavioral humility (with a nod to Robert Sapolsky) to replace snap character judgments with curiosity and smarter accountability.

Finally, we go inward. Leadership masks, persona, authenticity, and shadow show up in the room whether we admit it or not. You’ll leave with five questions to use before your next important conversation and a simple one-week experiment to run in a single team or meeting. Subscribe, share this with a leader who needs it, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

Transcript

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Mick Spiers: 0:01

Have you ever looked at someone you lead and realized that you may be responding to who they used to be rather than who they are becoming? Have you ever considered how much your team is shaping you, even as you are attempting to shape the team? And what might change if you stop thinking of leadership as managing a machine, and began seeing it as tending a live, co-evolving human ecosystem. Today's episode is going to be a solo cast where we reflect on the lessons that we learnt from, Ron Friedman, and Frans Campher. We pull it together and we look at what was common about these conversations and what can we do to implement what we've learned. Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Leadership Project. Over the past three episodes, we've explored leadership from three quite different perspectives. Within , we explored how to communicate an idea so that other people can understand it, connect with it, and act on it. With Dr. Ron Friedman, we moved from the individual communicator to the collective. We explored what turns a collection of talented people into a genuine team, and why individual productivity does not automatically produce collective performance, and with Frans Campher, we went deeper into the person doing the leading. We explored identity, values, authenticity, and the masks we sometimes wear because we believe that is what leadership requires of us. At first glance, these might seem to be three separate conversations, how we communicate, how teams perform, and how we show up as leaders. But I think they are deeply connected. Together, they invite us to see leadership not as something one person does to another, but as a living, evolving relationship, I want to explore that idea today through the metaphor of a garden. Not because leadership is always peaceful or beautiful, gardens can be messy. They can become overgrown. They can suffer through drought, disease, and neglect. But a garden helps us see something that a machine metaphor cannot. A machine is assembled; its parts are designed to remain consistent. If a component changes unexpectedly, we usually call that a fault. A garden is different, a garden is alive; everything in it is changing. The plants are changing. The soil is changing. The weather is changing. The balance of light, water, and nutrients is changing. The roots below the surface are interacting in ways we may never see, and the gardener is changing too. That feels much closer to the reality of leadership. We are not the same people we were yesterday. The people we lead are not the same people they were yesterday. Our relationships are not static. Our teams are not static. Our organizations are not static. We are evolving. They are evolving, and through our daily interactions, we are evolving together, so perhaps the work of leadership is not to control the garden. Perhaps it is to become more attentive to the conditions in which life can grow. Let us begin with Antoinette. One of the most important threads in that conversation was the difference between having an idea and helping another person receive it? As leaders, we often become deeply immersed in an issue. We have been thinking about the strategy for months. We have attended the meetings. We have studied the data. We know the history, the constraints, and the trade-offs. Then we stand in front of other people, and we try to explain the conclusion. And we are surprised when they do not immediately understand it. We may think, "I've explained this clearly. Why? Why are they not getting this? Why are they asking that question again? Why are they resisting?" But our people have not necessarily traveled the same path we have traveled. We may have been sharing Chapter Nine with someone who has not yet read Chapter One. We've been thinking about this idea for months, and they're hearing it for the first time. That is where the garden metaphor begins. An idea is like a seed. The seed may contain enormous potential, but throwing it into the ground is not the same as planting it. If the soil has not been prepared, if the conditions are wrong, or if the seed is buried too deeply, it may never grow. The same is true of communication, we can overwhelm people with everything we know. We can bury the central idea beneath detail, qualifications, and jargon. We can communicate to demonstrate our expertise rather than to create understanding. Then we blame the audience when the message does not come, does not take root. Antoinette's work invites us to ask a more generous question. What does this person need in order to take the next meaningful step? Not every step. Not everything I need. I need them to know, or everything I know. The next meaningful step. That requires clarity, but it also requires humility. It asks us to meet people where they are rather than where we wish they were, and to do that, we need more than speaking skills. We need to listen. We often think of communication as transmitting a message. I have an idea, I explain it, you understand it, and then you act. But human communication is rarely that linear. People do not receive our words as empty containers, they interpret them through their experiences. Expectations, identities, relationships, and current emotional state. The same sentence can create hope in one person and absolute fear in another. The same organizational change can feel like an opportunity to one person and a threat to another. The same piece of feedback can feel like investment from one leader and rejection from another, depending on the history of their relationship. This is why generative listening matters. Generative listening is more than waiting politely for our turn to speak. It is more than collecting information. It is listening with the possibility that something new may emerge between us. When I listen generatively, I am not merely asking how can I persuade you to accept my existing conclusion. I am asking what can I understand from your experience? What are you seeing that I cannot see? What might become possible if we think about this together? That is the beginning of co-creation, and there is an important shift here. When a leader enters a conversation convinced that they already possess the complete answer. Listening becomes performative. The leader may ask for input, but everyone can feel already that the decision was made before the meeting started. People quickly learn the difference between an invitation and a ritual when their contributions can generally shape the outcome, or it's just a performance. And when they do feel like their idea can shape the decision, they engage differently. They bring more of themselves. They take greater ownership. They surface risks earlier. They share that half-formed idea that may eventually become the breakthrough. In the garden, this is the difference between imposing a design without studying the environment and learning what the landscape itself is telling us where does the water naturally flow, which areas receive sunlight, what is already growing, what is the soil lacking. Good gardeners do not abandon intention; they still make choices, but their choices are informed by attention and awareness. Good leaders do the same, and this brings us to Ron Friedman. When we move from individual plants to a living system, we can have talented people, hardworking people, and well-intentioned people without having a high-performing team. A garden is not healthy simply because it contains several impressive plants. We have to look at the relationship between them. Are some competing for the same light? Are the roots supporting one another or choking one another? Is one part of the garden thriving by exhausting the soil needed by everything else? In organizations, we often optimize the individual and assume the team will take care of itself. We teach people personal productivity techniques. Protect your focus time. Turn off notifications. Batch your email. Manage your energy. Create your own system. And these practices can be absolutely useful. But as Ron reminded us, one person's productivity can become another person's bottleneck. I may feel highly productive because I have ignored messages for six hours, but if three colleagues cannot continue until I answer a question, my personal optimization has reduced the performance of the system. That does not mean we should make ourselves permanently available. No, that's not what we're saying. It means productivity cannot only be an individual

question. We also need to ask: 10:46

How do we coordinate attention as a team? When do we need focus work? When do we need rapid response? Which decisions require collaboration and consultation. What information must flow freely? Where are people waiting for one another? What agreements would allow all of us to do better work? This is the shift from a collection of individual habits to a shared operating system, and that shared operating system needs at least three things that came through strongly in Ron's conversation, shared goals, role clarity, and interdependence. A shared goal means more than displaying the same corporate objective on a slide. It means people understand what we are collectively trying to achieve, and can see how their individual contribution connects to it. Role clarity means people understand what they own, where they need to collaborate, and how decisions will be made. Interdependence means recognizing that our work genuinely affects one another, not in an abstract cultural sense, but in the practical reality of how work moves through the team. In a true team, success is not simply the total of isolated individual performances. We affect the conditions in which other people perform. My clarity affects your ability to act. My reliability affects your ability to trust. My willingness to ask for help affects whether problems are discovered early. My response to a mistake affects whether you tell me the truth next time, my ability to listen affects the quality of the ideas you are willing to share. This is the ecology of performance. So it's not to do away with individual productivity; it's to have a conversation about team productivity and to have rituals that work together, and this leads to one of the deepest ideas I believe is emerging through The Leadership project's body of work. We are shaped by our environment, but we also are part of that environment that's shaping everything else and everyone else. We are not merely individuals developing beside one another; we are co-evolving. Every interaction leaves a small trace. A leader repeatedly interrupts someone, and that person gradually contributes less. The leader then concludes that that person lacks initiative, because the leader sees less initiative. They become more directive. The person withdraws further, and before long, both people appear to have confirmed their original beliefs about the other. But what looks like a fixed personality trait may partly be a behavior produced inside the relationship. The opposite can happen too. A leader shows curiosity. Someone offers an unfinished idea. The leader treats it with care and asks a thoughtful question. The person gains confidence and returns with a stronger contribution. The leader sees their capability more clearly and gives them greater responsibility. They grow into that responsibility. Again, both people are changing. We sometimes speak as though leaders develop people in one direction. The leader acts and the employee develops, but the employee is also developing the leader. Their questions may expose gaps in our thinking. Their response may reveal our impact. Their courage may invite greater courage from us. Their trust may make it easier for us to become more open. Their challenge may interrupt a pattern we could not see on our own. We are continually becoming through one another. That is why leadership cannot be reduced to a toolkit applied to static human beings. The person in front of you today is not identical to the person you led six months ago, and neither are you. So do not lead the memory of the person. Lead the person that's emerging in front of you. This is where the work of Robert Sapolsky can bring some much-needed humility to our understanding of behavior. Sapolsky challenges the simple stories we create about why human beings do what they do. We see in action and immediately create a judgment about character. They miss the deadline because they're careless. They challenged me because they are difficult. They stayed quiet because they lack ambition. I lost my temper because the situation was unacceptable. But behavior has a history. What happened one second before? What happened an hour before? What pressure has been accumulating over days or months? What has this person learned about safety in this team, or from a previous team? What experiences have shaped the way they respond to authority, uncertainty, conflict, or criticism? What sleep, stress, fear, status dynamics, or organizational incentives are operating? Sapolsky's work helps us appreciate the immense number of biological, psychological, social, and environmental influences that converge in any one moment of human behavior. This does not mean behavior has no consequences. It does not mean leaders should tolerate harm or abandon accountability. It means accountability becomes more intelligent when it is joined by curiosity. We can hold a boundary and still seek to understand the conditions that produce the behavior. We can say this impact is not acceptable, and I want to understand what happened. That is behavioral humility. It is the recognition that if we lived with exactly the same biology, history, experiences, pressures, and immediate conditions, I cannot confidently claim that I would have behaved differently. That thought does not remove responsibility, it softens self-righteousness. It moves us from what is wrong with this person towards what happened here, what pattern are we seeing, what conditions are reinforcing it. What does this person need to take responsibility, and what conditions do we need to change so a better response becomes more possible? In the garden, blaming a plant for failing to grow while ignoring the absence of light, water, or nutrients would be absurd. Human beings are far more complex than plants, and we retain agency, choice, and responsibility. But our choices do not occur in a vacuum. So leadership is partly the work of making constructing behavior more possible to create the conditions where there's a higher possibility and probability of the behavior that we're looking for, and a decreased probability of the behavior that we're trying to avoid, and that leads us to Frans Campher. He took us beneath the visible system and into the inner world of the leader. Many of us inherit an image of what a leader should look like, strong, certain, decisive, unshakable, always in control. We observe leaders before us, absorb the culture around us, and begin constructing a leadership persona. Carl Jung used the term persona to describe the face we present to the world. The persona is not inherently false or harmful. We all need ways of participating in social life and fulfilling different roles. The problem comes when we become identified with the mask, when we no longer wear the role, but the role wears us. The leader who believes they must always be certain may stop asking questions. The leader who must always be strong may become unable. To ask for help, the leader who must always be agreeable may avoid the conversation everyone needs them to have. The leader who sees themselves as the smartest person in the room may gradually create a room in which everyone else stops thinking aloud. The mask begins as protection or adaptation, but over time, it becomes a prison, and the rest of the team adapts around it. People learn which version of the truth the leader can tolerate. They manage the leader's mood. They avoid particular topics. They perform agreement. They bring polished answers instead of emerging problems. The team may appear calm, but underneath the surface, the soil is being depleted. Authenticity offers a way forward, but we need to be careful with that word. Authenticity is not being impulsive. It is not saying this is just who I am and making everyone else responsible for our impact. Authenticity without self-awareness can become self-indulgent. Mature authenticity means greater alignment between our values, our intention, and our behavior. It includes responsibility. It asks, "Who am I when I'm not performing leadership. What am I trying to protect? What values do I want people to experience in my presence? And is that what they are actually experiencing?" Young also gives us the idea of the shadow, the parts of ourselves we struggle to recognize, accept, or integrate. These are not necessarily evil parts. They can include qualities we learned were

unacceptable: 21:57

anger, ambition, tenderness, uncertainty, dependence, power, Vulnerability, even creativity or confidence, can be pushed into shadow if expressing them once made us unsafe. What we refuse to see in ourselves does not disappear; it often emerges indirectly. We project it onto others. A leader who cannot accept their own uncertainty may become unusually irritated by hesitation in someone else. A leader who has disowned their desire for recognition may condemn ambition in another team member. A leader who sees themselves as endlessly supportive may fail to recognize their resentment when people do not reciprocate, a leader who identifies as rational may be governed by emotion without noticing it. The practical value of shadow work is not that every leader needs to become a Jungian analyst; it's that our strongest reactions become information. When someone's behavior creates a response that seems much larger than the immediate event, we can pause. What is being activated here? What story am I telling about this person? What quality in them am I unwilling to recognize in myself? What am I protecting? Again, this does not mean the other person's behavior is acceptable. Reflection should not become an excuse for avoiding boundaries. It means we examine our own contribution before assuming we can see the situation perfectly, asking ourselves the question, "What could I do differently to get a different result?" And the gardener is part of this ecology too. We are impacting the people in front of us. We are part of the garden. So, how do we make all of this useful? The stuff that we've been talking about today. Before your next important leadership conversation, I invite you to move through five questions. What am I planting? What is the central idea? Can I express it simply? What do I want people to understand, feel, or do? Am I communicating to serve their understanding, or to demonstrate how much I know? And what is the next meaningful step? Second, what is already in the soil? What history does this team bring to the conversation? What previous promises, disappointments, or successes may shape how the message is received? What assumptions am I making about their behavior? What pressure or incentives may be influencing what I see? Third, what are we growing? Together, is this genuinely a shared goal? Are roles and responsibilities clear? Where are we interdependent? Fourth, what am I bringing into the garden? Which leadership mask am I wearing? What am I trying to prove or protect? What reaction in me needs examination, and what would alignment with my values look like in this moment? Fifth, what needs tending next? Does someone need encouragement, clarity, challenge, space, support, or a boundary? What should be watered, pruned? What obstacle can I remove? These questions do not produce perfect leadership. There is no such thing, but they help us become more awake and more aware to what is happening. So here is my invitation for the

week ahead: 25:59

choose one team, one relationship, or one recurring meeting. Do not try to redesign the whole organization. Observe this one small ecosystem for one week, and notice who speaks first, who is interrupted, whose ideas are developed by others, who waits for permission. Where does information stop? What behavior receives attention? What happens when someone disagrees? What happens when someone admits they do not know? And perhaps most importantly, what changes in the room when you change your own behavior? Try speaking last. Ask one more question. Allow silence to do some work. Name a contribution that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Clarify a shared goal. Remove one recurring source of friction. Then observe what emerges. This is not a trick for manipulating the team. It's an experiment in relationship. If we change the conditions, the behavior of the system may change, and as the system changes, it may change us too. The deepest lesson across these conversations may be that leadership is neither self-expression or system control. It is participation with responsibility. Antoinette reminds us that the seed in our hand is not yet understanding. We need to listen, translate, and help people find the next step. Ron reminds us that growth is relational. Individual excellence must become shared purpose, coordination, interdependence, and collective learning. Frans reminds us that the gardener cannot stand outside the garden. Our identity, values, masks, and unexamined patterns become part of the environment other people experience. So I'll leave you with these questions: What are you planting through the words you use? What are you cultivating through the behaviors you you reward? What is your team teaching one another about trust, truth, and belonging? What mask might you be ready to loosen? What old story about someone needs to be updated, and what is one condition you can change this week that may allow something new to grow? Thank you for joining me on this episode of The Leadership Project. Next week we're going to be joined by Dusty Holcomb, the founder and CEO of Arcus Group, and he's going to be expanding on this concept about how curiosity creates leadership. You've been listening to The Leadership Project. If today sparked an insight, don't keep it to yourself. Share it with one other person who would benefit from listening to the show. A huge thank you to Gerald Calibo for his tireless work editing every episode, and to my amazing wife Sei, who does all the heavy lifting in the background to make this show possible. None of this happens without them. Around here, we believe leadership is a practice, not a position. That people should feel seen, heard, valued, and that they matter, and that the best leaders trade ego for empathy, certainty for curiosity, and control for trust. If that resonates with you, please subscribe on YouTube and on your favorite podcast app. And if you want more, follow me on LinkedIn and explore our archives for conversations that move you from knowing to doing. Until next time, lead with curiosity, courage, and care.