S5E9 Mick Spiers: Founder of the Leadership Project, on the Platinum Rule of Leadership, Deep Listening, and Overcoming Impostor Syndrome...

How do you get individuals from point A to point B, whether this is public transportation, this is taxi services, this is individual vehicles. So really interesting concept and we'll dive into some of that and how he developed his leadership style through that and what that looks like. And then he realized we have a leadership crisis going on and he founded The Leadership Project to address that. And I'm excited to explore your story. So welcome to the show here, Mick!

What was the journey of going I would love to get into planning urban mobility and how people get around in cities.

And I was thinking nothing of it. I was sitting in the back of an air conditioned van. I was actually either reading or sometimes I had my head in my laptop. I was just oblivious to my environment. And then it came to bear that there was a public holiday in the Philippines, but to finish the gig that we were doing, we needed to work that day. And sure enough, I got picked up by the same van that was going to take me from the hotel to the office and it took 10 minutes.

And I started asking them, so how long does it take you to get to work? And they would laugh. And I would say anything between 40 minutes to four hours and they weren't joking.

And I wanted to do something about it and I pivoted. Almost by accident. It was one of those things opportunity knocked up. So I pivoted from what I was doing to an opportunity with my employer at the time they said we're starting this new thing called ground transportation systems, would you like to be involved? And I said what's it about? And the more I discovered it was to solve that very problem that I'd seen, I was all in and I spent 15 years in that industry.

Starting off as a bid manager, then a project manager and so on and so forth. And until I got to the point where I was leading global businesses that were doing urban mobility solutions. And it became a real passion for me to de-stress that commute and to improve people's quality of life by doing so. And I had the purpose was to create a city where people could move freely without delay. Without congestion and ultimately without stress.

And then that probably leads us to what you're going to ask about the leadership project and how I prepare it from there.

What does that look like? Then what does it look like in terms of perfect world. Like you're talking about, if you could create that perfect city, if you are starting from absolute scratch what are the things, what are the variables? What are the criteria that need to be considered just make it so that's a reality?

They need to do more in investing in that and doing some of those hard projects of what it takes to streamline their infrastructure. But for the majority of cities, that's not the case. It's actually through poor use of the existing infrastructure. If I told you Michael, that the average vehicle occupancy in the world is 1.3 people per car, 1.3. And in some cities it gets lower than one point. Los Angeles has got the lowest average vehicle occupants see in the world at something like 1.07.

That means that all of those sea of cars that you see in a traffic jam, it's not actually people that you're seeing. You're seeing huge chunks of metal, inefficient chunks of metal, where people single drivers are going about their day, and not the full capacity the road network of the bus network of the rail network, they're all sitting in private motor vehicles. So that would be first one is do we look at unlocking the capacity and what we've already got?

And this is when we start looking at all kinds of things. How can we increase that occupancy levels. How do we encourage people to use a combination of services such as, imagine a world someone is taking Uber from their home to the nearest station or a railway station, whether using public transit as the heavy lifter for the middle malls, but then they might be connecting on to an east Ghouta for the last mile. So as we've had this digital transformation in the world, how do we get smart?

About using the infrastructure that we've got now in a little bit of defense of the cities of the world that have that have been part of this problem. It is prohibitively expensive to build a public transit network that covers where everyone live and where everyone works, particularly in a urban sprawl city, like Sydney, like Los Angeles, again Brisbane. There's many that I could mention where the population density is not necessarily that high.

So the population density in Sydney is 626 people per square kilometer, which is not a lot. So if you, then it's a big city. Big city. It's a geographically big city. So if you try to build a railway network that covers the entire city, it's just privately expensive. So the secret to the future of urban mobility is to use the right mode. For the right leg, every single time.

So urban public transit agencies can not compete with the likes of Uber, Lyft, grab D all our, you name it, all of those ride hailing services. They can't compete with those first and last mile. Convenience of being able to pick someone up at their door and the like, Those vehicles those ride hail vehicles do not have the capacity and the heavy lifting the public transit.

So the secret to the future will be to take those people, pick them up from their doorstep, drop them to the nearest mass interchange where they do get into mass transit solutions and where they get carried with a high occupancy vehicle for the majority of their journey. And then they'll have some kind of connecting service to finish off the journey.

And then you can start getting into things like how do we do things like optimizing things like traffic and one of the utopias that we can experience, particularly as we get to things like connected vehicles, doesn't even have to be autonomous at this point, but connected vehicles where we start getting vehicles to talk to him for sure. And imagine a world where you're getting your car. If you are a preferred car driver, if you like, hopefully there's more than one of you in that car.

But if you are a car driver, imagine your commute is so well scheduled that you get green lights everywhere you go. And we do have the power to make that happen. It will take time to work it out, but with digital transformation in the world, I do see a world where people do start having much more seamless commute than they do today.

Even if you have the infrastructure, how do you go about creating that movement? Where people go, this is what we do. Like that culture

It's your steering wheel, your accelerator pedal off you go thing. None of them dreamed that it would actually become a prison and you'd sit in traffic in your little metal shell going nowhere fast. So the dream of personal freedom turned out to be a fallacy over time because of increased urbanization and the dramatic increase in people that could afford motor vehicles. That was a big part when motor vehicles become affordable for the middle class and we had the explosion of that.

And when I was growing up, it was a Rite of passage. Your first car, getting your keys to your first car was part of becoming an adult. It was something that we always dreamed off. Why do I think that there's a glimmer of hope on the horizon? The answer is Millenials. Millennials have different values than I'm a gen X. And my parents were baby boomers.

The the values have changed over time and millennials are starting to not cherish so much material possessions and they will look at something like a motor vehicle and they'll. Okay. All right. So I'm going to spend thousands of dollars on an app. That I only used 4% of the time, the rest of the time it's parked somewhere. And that

That's

example, was when some of the things I was just covering and one of the ones that I read, and can't, I can never unread this. If you like, was this report by ATD said that only 16% of people in the world truly love their job, and like their boss. And then I continued to read, I'd read Gallup reports. So about the level of disengagement and everything I keep done writing just reinforced and sometimes made it worse going.

Wow. And that was a huge realization that I'd spent 15 years of my career trying to de-stress people's commute to, and from the workspace. The place that was really stressing them out was in the four walls of that business. And they're spending up to one third of their life, Michael, in jobs that don't inspire them or worse, still completely stressed them out.

So from a personal purpose point of view, you could argue that my purpose hasn't changed because I want to improve people's quality of life. And I want to de stress it where I've. Is, I'm not, no longer focusing on the commute to and from work. And I'm focusing on the workspace itself.

Being able to articulate those to the world, not be shy about it. Stand up and tell people the things that you believe in your values, your beliefs, coupling that with your purpose and your mission, to be able to articulate a vision. And give people purpose and meaning and what they do by doing those things.

So if you can get out there and express in the most clear way, what your purpose, your vision, your mission, your values and beliefs are, there's this funny thing where you start attracting people around you that believe the same things that you believe they start knocking on your door and. That's really interesting make, how do I become part of that?

And you start building that around and people want the workplace, things that they want to have purpose and meaning, they realize it's the impact of what they do, not what they do that becomes important. The second thing they want is I want to be respected. Everyone has a voice and everyone wants to be heard and feel like they're heard everyone wants their opinions to be listened to and valued. And everyone wants to feel like they individually and collectively matter. So how do you do that?

You get out there and you talk about your purpose, your your meaning, your values and beliefs, and then you'll do a whole heap. Yeah, ask the right questions you take the time to get to know someone treat them the way that they want to be treated. So well known for I, a blog post I once did that said, I broke the golden rule and I'm proud of it, or I love it or something like that. And the golden rule, we're always taught that you should treat other people the way you want to be treated.

And let's just not enough. You need people the way they want to be treated. And that means a genuine interest in them. Ask them questions, be present, be in the moment. Listen to them without judgment, listen to them without any fear of retribution and give them that psychologically safe environment where they feel that they could tell you almost anything.

And that creates the environment where they'll never be scared to stick up their hand where they, when they need help, it gives them the environment where they will come to you with their best ideas and encourage you with diversity of thought to give you the best thoughts that you can do. And by doing this, you're getting to know them and you be, you can become this, reflect back to them, to shine to them. What their superpower is.

And I fully believe that every single person on this planet has their own unique superpower, but sometimes it takes a great leader or a great coach or whatever the case might be to help them discover it. And then to give them the environment for that superpower to flourish. That's the role of the leader. It's all about relationships. It's all about getting to know your team and then giving them the environment where they can flourish.

And a lot of times it's because of this aspect. So that actually

And I think it's great. I think this is strong leadership. I'm going to write, we need to do this. Then we need to do this. Then we need to do this. Any questions? Great. And I walk out the room thinking that they're a great leader, but that has not allowed any of those team members to grow, to bring their own kind of thoughts to the table. So it stops. With trying to be the last one to speak, not the first one to speak, you start building it. And it's a habit that takes time.

Active listening is when you are showing the other person by being present by looking in their eyes, by picking up what they're saying. And in some respects, paraphrasing it back to not in the same words, you're looking to make sure that you are, have a common understanding of what was said. So paraphrasing back to them. So what I'm hearing from you there, Michael is ABC is that, what is the concern for you? All right.

So making sure that they feel like they've heard, they've been heard that's what's active listening. The next one I would say is about deep listening. Deep listening also takes practice and deep listening is, comes from the work of theory you from auto Sharma and it has four levels and many people get stuck at the, or one level. One is when you only hear things that you already know.

All the things that you want to hear, and you're not picking up all of the other things that are going on around you to go to level two, you need to listen with an open mind, forget everything that you already know, and just intently. Listen with an open mind about what the other person is saying and why they're saying it. Level three is that listen with an open heart, is to pay attention to the emotion going on there. Are they frustrated? they angry?

Are they showing passion here, picking up their emotions are taking them and level four. This one's really challenging by the way, level four is listening with an open will and listening with an open will means that you are open to accepting new realities. This is the kind of thing that the world changes from where the world is not flat. You need to listen with an open will to understand that the world is fair and not flat as. So deep listening would be the second one.

And the last one, once again, takes practice seeing the whole of the person. So listening to someone is not about what they're saying. It's about everything. It's about their facial expressions. It's about their body language, their posture, seeing the whole of the person noticing when something ships, but not noticing it with any kind of. Or any kind of criticism or anything like that, it'll be something like this.

Michael had noticed a shift in your face right now, a big smile came to your face. What was that? So rather than guessing. Oh, Michael's really happy. Right now, there could have been any reason why small came to his face at the very moment. So you ask the question and you be curious at all times. So seeing the whole of the person and noticing when there's shifts happening with them, and if you can do all of these things, it does take practice.

You become an amazing communicator because you are receiving. Before you're actually spreading any kind of information that you're looking to.

I wanted to talk about Your book as well, so you're giving these incredible insights and stuff. So your book, it's called, "You're a Leader, now what?" Can you talk about what made you want to write that, and then why it be beneficial for leaders? Some of the important aspects that you talk about in your book?

And so for first time leaders, they go through what I call the emotional roller coaster. And nearly all of us have been through this. If you reflect back on your own career with a deep level of objectivity, you've probably been through this at some point in your career yourself. So that it goes from, this goes from euphoric excitement and joy. That you've finally been recognized for all of your hard work.

You've probably been a wonderful individual contributor, a great software engineer, a great digital marketer, a great nurse. I don't care what your career is. You've probably been very good at now. Eventually you get tapped on the shoulder and you get a promotion. So you go through this euphoric excitement that you've been promoted. And shortly after it's followed by the of anxiety when you realize that no one has shown you what it means to be a leader.

And what typically happens at that point, apart from things already holding that person back and imposter syndrome, kicking him and really impacting them personally, what they start doing is they start looking left and right. And their only point of reference becomes to mimic the behavior of those around them. And now wind back to our stats from ATD with only 16% of people in the world, truly loving their job and liking their boss. That's a very hit and miss affair.

And what they start doing is mimicking the behavior of the bad boss, the horrible boss. They think that is what the leader is supposed to do from the models that they've seen before them. So I wrote the book. To help people through that emotional rollercoaster and to give them a jumpstart towards high-performance leadership, by not following the habits of those them. A great example in the book is the building of what I call an Amalgam Leader, where I get the people. It's a very practical book.

It's got exercises at the end of every chapter. I get people to stop and think about all of the leaders that they've had in their past. And to categorize what was good about them and what was not good about them so that they can learn those lessons from, oh yeah. I really liked it when Chris did this and it really inspired me and made me feel like I mattered. And when Jim did this or Sarah did that, made me feel two inches tall. And didn't care about me, et cetera.

So bottling those up and creating this of what a great leader looks like. So that you'd don't repeat the mistakes of the past, but you do benefit from the wonderful examples of leadership that you've had in your past. So that's what the book is about. And I mentioned that there's something in it for all of us, because the other thing is that not just first time leaders struggle with that transition, their managers and their leaders and their executives also struggled to.

Mentor the next generation of leaders. So it's also a good reference point for anyone that is my age or older, that's looking to mentor the next generation of leaders as well.

And then also, how can we work through that fear and that imposter syndrome of going wow, what if everybody found out that, I don't really know what I'm talking about.

One of the things to break is that you don't need to be an expert. You don't need to have all of the answers to be a great leader. And that's one of the mistakes that many people have. They feel like, oh, I'm the leader. Now I must know the answers. Everyone's going to come to me with questions. Great later, just like you said before with Michael Bungay Stanier. So MBS hope you're listening to the show. He will turn that back and say no, a great leader ask more questions and I give answers.

So the first thing to break her imposter syndrome is. That you do not have to know all the answers and to be effective as a leader or as effective in whatever your chosen profession is. It's about the ability to attract and retain talented people around you. That compliment your skills. You don't have to do everything to be successful. The second part is when you're trying to help someone, all you have to do is to have more knowledge than they have. To be able to be helpful to them.

So share your experiences and say I'm not necessarily an expert in this, but from my experience, this is what works and what didn't work for me. You're already helping that person. And you're further down the track than what you think. So have some faith, have some belief that what you have. It's important that every single person on this planet has a superpower and you need to be ready to share that with people.

And the, secondly don't think that you need to have all the answers and the third don't be afraid to have an open conversation and be vulnerable about it. People respect that.

A lot of incredible resources and stuff in there. I want to, I wanted to ask, what do you have on your plate right now? Like where can people go to connect with you to participate in the incredible work that you're doing? What does that look like?

So ICF accredited coaching to take you on a transformative approach to take your leadership to the next level we have training courses. Our flagship course is called The Gateway to High-performance Leadership, where we take people through an eight week program where there's two sessions per week of two hours each. And we embrace the techniques of collaborative or social, microlearning and gamification to make sure that learning is put into practice.

Too many times, people will send on a leadership retreat, or if you go five day course, 10 day course, whatever the case might be. And they get blessed and say, okay, that you're a leader now. And they have a wonderful time and they learn lots of things. But I don't necessarily put into practice. So we've broken all of that down into a transformative course that actually puts it into applied learning instead of just an interesting experience where you have.

And then finally we do workshops for businesses as well, where we help businesses to create high performance teams. So their team workshops, where we go through a process that's based around the Drexler Sibbet team performance model to help people to form as quickly as possible to that high performance stage. That includes by the way, something. I didn't see coming, but it's been very prevalent in the work that we're doing. Some remediation work.

So quite often a team has been together 15 months, 18 months, two years, et cetera, and cracks start to form in the relationships, et cetera. it could be returning your team high performance and to its former glory days, is also that we do. We've got a number of different resources on our website as well, Michael. So people go to www.mickspiers.com they'll be able to see all of these services that I'm talking about and register for our course or inquire for coaching services or workshops.

But we also have some resources like our self-reflection journal. I've been practicing self-reflection now for must be 13 years every year. Every day. I asked myself the same questions, which are what went well today. What didn't go well today? What would I do differently next time if I had my time over. What did I learn about myself today? And what did I learn about others?

And I've built that too together with some other tools that help you find your purpose and meaning, and find your leadership credo and the amalgam leader stuff. I've put that into a free downloadable journal that you can get on the website as well.

The question that I usually end with that I'm for you is how would you define success?

And I was a very successful project manager in that regard, but I now realize that success is something else. Then I'll add one more thing about my personal career. I used to think that success will all about promotions and pay rises and kudos and all that kind of stuff. And with that, I've also pivoted as well. So to me, success is actually about joy and it's about the reward that I get from helping other people. It's the impact of what I do.

That's important, not actually what I do and about leaving a lasting improvement in the world by the work that I do. That's what brings your ward. And I find myself in this leadership space, whether it be coach Jean teaching, being on a podcast like this, where I just get completely in a flow. I'm just in the moment.

And I enjoy it so much from watching other people grow and helping them to become great leaders, because I know that the impact on that has a multiplication effect that it's, it, it goes out. So for me, success is defined by joy and joy is achieved by helping us. And helping others to be create these amazing teams and these amazing workspaces. So reward for me is now different to fiscal reward now to be clear, and anyone in the audience is probably thinking yeah, but I've got to pay my mortgage.

Yes. You need to find something that has some kind of monetization or monetary reward where you can put a roof over your family's head, put food on the table, sustain yourself. Absolutely. But that to me is not success. Success is finding yourself in a place where every day, your feeling at the end of the day, that reward that joy, that sustainable feeling that you made a difference.