#099 – Additive vs. Reductive Leadership | 52 Life Lessons – Lesson 19

[00:00:03] There's something funny about leadership. Most people imagine leadership begins when someone gives you a title, an office, or a team. It's as if when vice president appears behind your name, wisdom descends from the heavens and your communication skills become flawless and people begin eagerly awaiting your strategic directions. Unfortunately, that's not how it works.

[00:00:27] My first experience at leadership came long before I had a title that anyone would be impressed by. While it came earlier than this, I first recognized it as I was a teenager working in a summer camp, teaching baseball to young kids. Technically, my job was to help them throw, catch, hit, learn the game. But the real work was bigger than baseball.

[00:00:51] It was helping a nervous child step up to the plate, encouraging someone who had missed five balls in a row to try the sixth one. Creating an environment where kids felt safe, safe enough to look awkward, to make mistakes, to learn, laugh, and keep going, even when they found it frustrating. Now, I didn't call this leadership at the time. I was just having fun and trying to help.

[00:01:17] As I got older, the settings and the stakes changed. I became a strength and conditioning coach, working with elite athletes, then a personal trainer, working with executives and entrepreneurs, then a business owner, starting my own business and working with employees and teams within my organization. Then I started teaching workshops, facilitating, being a corporate consultant, an executive coach, and a keynote speaker.

[00:01:43] But the most meaningful part of the work remained remarkably consistent, despite all these variations on what I was doing. And that was to help another human see more possibility in themselves, to give them the tools, the confidence, perspective, and encouragement to do something that they couldn't or wouldn't do before. That desire to inspire people and create a positive impact became one of my primary catalysts for building my business.

[00:02:12] The strange thing is that because it came naturally to me, I didn't recognize just how powerful it was until I stopped doing it. Early in my business, as I was figuring out the ropes and learning how to become a leader, I was becoming increasingly frustrated with inconsistencies in our service delivery. Certain processes weren't being followed. The customer experience varied depending on who was working or who was giving the service.

[00:02:39] Things I believed that should be straightforward just weren't happening consistently. Naturally, while I did what many intelligent, well-intentioned, and slightly frustrated business owners would do, I created policies. Lots of policies. I documented procedures, clarified expectations, and issued what was essentially an executive decree. Here's the new system. Follow it. Problem solved. As we know, it wasn't solved. The policies failed spectacularly.

[00:03:09] In some cases, they actually made the situation worse. People became more frustrated. The inconsistencies continued. Instead of creating clarity and accountability, I just added more paperwork, confusion, and resentment. In fact, I lost a couple great people because of that. At the time, I was baffled. I'd explained what needed to happen, and I'd written it down. So why were these thoughtful, capable, intelligent people doing?

[00:03:39] Why weren't they doing what I told them? And without realizing it, I'd begun treating the situation as though my team members were deliberately trying to frustrate me and sabotage the business. And of course they weren't. They were amazing. Amazing people. Amazing humans. The issue was mine. The issue was mine. They were navigating behavioral, operational, and organizational challenges that I hadn't taken the time to understand.

[00:04:05] I'd addressed the visible symptoms while ignoring the root causes. And it wasn't until I took my proverbial head out of my butt and retired the executive decree and began having genuine conversations with my team that things changed. We looked at where the process was breaking down. What was unclear? What barriers were people facing?

[00:04:32] What did the policy conflict with the reality when they were trying to serve the client? And what did the team see that I couldn't from my position? Most importantly, I stopped trying to force people to comply with my solution and invited them to help solve our shared problem. And the results were remarkably fast. The team became more engaged. The process improved. Service became more consistent.

[00:05:00] Our clients had better experience and the business performed better. Now, this may not sound like rocket science now. It certainly doesn't to me as I'm speaking it. But at the time, it was transformational. It helped me become conscious of how my actions as a leader shaped our culture. How they influenced behavior. Neither increased or reduced the team's ability to perform.

[00:05:26] That experience led me to a distinction that I now think about when referring to leadership. And that's that leadership can be additive or leadership increases the capacity of the people and the systems around you. It adds clarity. It builds confidence. It develops trust, knowledge, energy, ownership, and meaning. Whereas reductive leadership does the opposite.

[00:05:51] It creates confusion, fear, dependence, exhaustion, mistrust, and even unnecessary friction in the system. Now, reductive leadership can still produce results, at least for a while. Authority, pressure, fear, and financial incentives are powerful motivators. And people will respond to them.

[00:06:13] But the results often generated are the ones that slowly grind down the people responsible for producing those results. One approach strengthens the system. The other consumes it. And this distinction matters because reductive leadership is often mistaken for strong leadership. A leader that's decisive, demanding, constantly pushing, always available, involved in every decision. From a distance, that can look impressive. They're getting things done.

[00:06:44] They're taking control of the team. But inside the team, everyone's waiting for approval. They're protecting themselves from blame, withholding bad news. We're trying to guess which version of the boss is going to show up this day. The environment that reductive leadership creates does not breed sustainable high performance. It breeds organizational anxiety at the systemic level.

[00:07:09] Additive leadership, now keep in mind, does not mean lowering our standards or avoiding conflict or trying to keep everyone happy. Some decisions are just going to disappoint people. Some conversations will be very uncomfortable. Strategies change. Budgets get cut. People are held accountable. And occasionally, well, people have to leave the organization. Human-centered leadership is not the equivalent of a cheesy group hug.

[00:07:38] It's primarily about the mindset and behavior we bring to these difficult leadership moments. We can communicate clearly. We can provide context. We can listen without surrendering responsibility. We can hold high standards while treating people with dignity, fairness, and respect. The most effective leaders bring both backbone and heart. Because kindness without standards, well, that becomes avoidance. Standards without humanity can become abuse.

[00:08:08] Leadership lives in the tension between those two. Now, the business world has spent decades treating people and profitability as competing priorities. You can either care about your employees or you can deliver results. You can support well-being or you can demand performance. Maybe you can be compassionate or you can be competitive. It's a remarkably persistent belief. Especially considering how little sense it makes. Organizations don't produce results.

[00:08:38] People using organizational systems produce results. Now, research involving more than 100 individuals and team samples found that empowering leadership is positively associated with performance, creativity, trust, and helpful workplace behavior. In practical terms, when leaders give people clear context, meaningful responsibility, appropriate autonomy, support, and trust, well, people perform better.

[00:09:08] Not rocket science. I know. People want some influence over how they do their work. They want to feel capable and able to improve. They want to belong, contribute, and understand why their work matters. This is basic behavioral science. Supporting these needs is not a distraction from performance. It's one of the conditions that makes performance possible. Now, a powerful business example comes from Paul O'Neill, who was the CEO of Alcoa in 1987, way back then.

[00:09:38] Some of you, like me, were alive back then and remember it. Alcoa was one of the world's largest industrial companies at the time. Its employees worked around heavy machinery, extreme temperatures, and molten metal. When O'Neill took over, he made worker safety a central leadership priority and set an aspiration of zero workplace injuries. Not slightly fewer injuries. Not an industry average injury rate. Zero.

[00:10:05] It initially confused investors and analysts who expected the new CEO to talk about margins and market share and growth. But O'Neill understood something important. Improving safety required the company to improve everything surrounding the work. Employees needed to report problems quickly. Leaders then needed to listen. People needed permission to speak up. Information had to travel across departments and levels of authority. Processes had to become more consistent.

[00:10:34] And during O'Neill's tenure, Alcoa dramatically reduced lost workdays caused by injuries and illness. At the same time, the company strengthened its operations in business performance. Safety was not separate from performance. It became a catalyst for performance. O'Neill chose the human outcome that required the entire operating system to improve. That's additive leadership.

[00:11:00] So, you've probably heard the saying that the true job of a leader is to create more leaders, not more followers. Now, this sounds great on some conference stage. But the idea becomes more confronting when we examine our daily behavior. Do your people become more capable around you or more dependent? Do they understand how to make decisions? Or have they learned to wait for your decision? Can they challenge your thinking without being punished?

[00:11:27] Or even worse, do you say that they can challenge your thinking, but then subconsciously or behaviorally punish them in other ways? Do they bring problems forward early, or do they hide them until problems are impossible to ignore? Are you developing judgment or merely demanding compliance? A leader who needs to remain at the center of every conversation may produce a group of obedient followers.

[00:11:52] But a leader who provides context, coaching, trust, and meaningful ownership begins creating other leaders. And those other humans in the business start to thrive. This requires shifting from always providing answers to asking better questions. It requires leading with humility. By asking people, what do you think? What are we missing? What would you recommend? What decision would you make if I weren't here?

[00:12:18] It also requires allowing someone to struggle productively instead of grabbing the work back the moment things become uncomfortable. Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety shows why this matters. Teams learn more effectively when people feel able to raise concerns, admit mistakes, ask questions, and challenge assumptions without fear of humiliation or punishment. Now, psychological safety doesn't mean freedom from accountability.

[00:12:46] It means people do not have to spend most of their mental bandwidth trying not to look foolish. People can't grow into leaders when self-protection becomes their full-time job. And we see that a lot in organizations these days. I certainly hear it from my coaching clients that many workplaces, they don't feel psychologically safe to speak up because they will be punished if they make a mistake or say something, quote, stupid.

[00:13:15] Now, leadership starts with leading yourself. None of this works particularly well if you're unable to lead yourself. Now, you might have heard the saying that you can't pour from an empty cup. I disagree slightly. You can pour from an empty cup. I did it for years. But what comes out is usually a mixture of caffeine, cortisol, impatience, and fumes. It may work temporarily, but it's neither sustainable or particularly pleasant for the people standing nearby.

[00:13:44] Eventually, exhaustion changes the quality of our leadership. We become less patient, less curious, less creative, and less generous in our interpretation of others. We react faster and we reflect less. So leading yourself is not selfish. It protects the quality of your influence. Your mindset shapes how you interpret people and problems.

[00:14:09] Your habits determine whether your values appear in your actions or remain just attractive words on the wall. Your movement, recovery, and fuel influence your energy, your emotional regulation, and the ability to make thoughtful decisions. Now, you don't need to be perfect in these areas. You need enough awareness and consistency to show up as a leader that you claim you want to be. And every interaction you make creates a ripple.

[00:14:36] At home, at work, in your community, even during a brief conversation with a stranger, you leave people with something. More energy or less. More clarity or confusion. Confidence or doubt. Possibility or limitation. Confidence or limitation. And for leaders, that ripple effect is amplified. One impatient comment can silence a team. One thoughtful question can unlock an idea.

[00:15:05] A moment of genuine recognition can change how someone sees their potential. Now, the word love may sound uncomfortable in a corporate leadership conversation. And you don't have to put it in the quarterly strategy deck. But care, courage, dignity, respect, fairness, and a genuine desire to help another human thrive are all forms of love and action. And they're also serious business tools.

[00:15:33] As you move through the next few days, ask yourself these three questions. First, how am I leading myself? Second, are my actions adding to the capacity of the people around me or reducing it? And third, who's becoming a stronger leader because of how I showed up? And pick one person this week. Give them more context. Ask for their recommendation. Let them make a meaningful decision.

[00:16:03] Support them without taking over. Then step back and let them lead. Because the true mark of your leadership is not how many people follow you while you're in the room. It's how well they lead when you're not. So think well, live well, and be well. I'll see you on the next episode. That wraps up another episode of the Working Well podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

[00:16:32] Now, which guests or topics would you like to see featured on the show? Message me through LinkedIn or on the contact page of timboris.com with your ideas. Thanks for tuning in. I'm Tim Boris with Fresh Wellness Group, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thank you.