Eradicating Fear-Based Leadership with Amy Brown

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation! JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire! brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Online Marketing Made Easy. Today, we'll be breaking down how to eradicate fear-based leadership. To drop these value bombs, I am brought to Amy Brown and the EO Fire Studios. Amy is the founder and CEO of Authentics, a software platform that analyzes and activates patient voices at scale to reveal transformational opportunities in healthcare. And today, Foundation, we'll talk about fear-based leadership, some examples.

0:37We'll talk about the first step in moving away from fear-based leadership and why unlearning fear-based leadership is important for both leaders and employees and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Amy and our sponsors. Business Made Simple, hosted by Donald Miller, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Business Made Simple takes the mystery out of growing your business. Join my friend, Donna Miller, each week as he shares value bombs on topics like the secret to making better marketing decisions.

1:10Listen to Business Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts. Ever thought of giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world and four-time TEDx speaker Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions. Amy, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Hello, everyone. So yes, I've been thinking about this question. And here is what I believe based on my experience around this concept of success.

1:58The first half of life, success is all about things we're gaining, like gaining new skills, gaining new job opportunities, gaining new ways of navigating the business world or our professional world. But then you hit this like middle section of your life and I have hit that stage. And what I'm learning about success now is that it's really more about letting go. So what behaviors have you acquired that are no longer serving you? Letting those go. getting clear about what is really important in your life and letting those that are not all that important, letting those go. And so, yeah, the concept of success just keeps evolving for me, the older I get and the more career experience I have.

2:55Well, I'm right there with you. I'm in that middle stage doing all those things as well. And it really is a very interesting, ever-evolving process. And today, Fire Nation, we're talking all about eradicating fear-based leadership. And Amy, I wanna hear your story of the founding of Authentics and what your company specifically works towards. Yes, so Authentics is a conversational AI company and our whole mission is to help humans understand humans and specifically humans that are in a position of power in our healthcare industry. And so these are corporate C-suite and leadership teams who sit on mounds and mounds of customer conversation data all day, all year.

3:46But those conversations and the voices within those conversations are pretty much left on a shelf and not listened to. And so Authentics is all about scaling the ability for people all over corporate enterprises to hear the literal voice of their customer. And this company was founded after I spent 20 years working in corporate healthcare settings. And one of my roles was managing contact centers. And I just became fascinated with the fact that my colleagues in marketing and sales in the C-suite thought of conversational data inside of contact centers as being very transactional. But what I knew from working in that space and listening to the conversations was that these interactions were full of insights and full of humanity.

4:41And it could really fuel our entire culture and motivate and inspire an entire workforce if we only could listen the way we needed to, to become inspired. And so that's what I did. I got that idea at that stage in my life. I had surpassed the age of 40. I had had my fourth child, my husband, and I had made a decision that he was going to be a stay-at-home dad. And then I decided I was going to quit my job and our secure source of income and jump into the fire of starting my own business. And that's really how it all started. Well, I want to start at the core of what our conversation is going to be focused around today, which is fear-based leadership.

5:31So what is fear-based leadership? So fear-based leadership is a set of behaviors that leaders can demonstrate when they are fueled by things that they are afraid of, but they may not know. So oftentimes, this looks like leaders who are coming from a place of insecurity or a place of wanting to protect what's theirs or a place of wanting to not be found out because they're worried that perhaps they don't belong where they're at. And when leaders have not dealt with their own internal baggage or internal challenges that they have, as all of us as humans do, it tends to show up in nasty ways in the workplace.

6:23And that's what fear-based leadership is to me and what I observed in my growing up in the corporate world. Now, I love specific examples. And I know Fire Nation does too because it just brings everything to life. So can you share some real world issues that somebody who uses a fear-based approach to leadership will encounter? I had several bosses, for example, where when you'd go into work that day, you would never quite be sure which version of that boss would show up. I remember feeling like if that day my leader had been feeling insecure or worried about a performance metric. They might use fear to make me feel gaslit, like, hey, you're not providing me what I need, their tone becoming more accusatory, or me not being able to figure out what they wanted and why.

7:22Whereas leaders who operate from a place of security and psychological safety would always make me feel the opposite, always knowing where I stand, always knowing what I can expect, and always allowing me as the team member to show up vulnerably if I didn't always have the answers. Now, it seems like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, I'm actually reading his book by Walter Isaacson that recently came out that's fascinating. It seems like they kind of made this a popular technique to intimidate, to be overly alpha, to have this fear-based leadership approach. What are your thoughts around that? There are some cultures and some humans that feel inspired when there is a command and control style leader at the top.

8:17And certainly, especially in the younger parts of my career, you know, having leaders that demanded and expected me to be at a certain level, it did push me, right? It did push me and it caused me to really examine, you know, if I was well prepared for the task at hand. But the problem with that is that it's not sustainable because at any course of our lives, there are times when we make mistakes. There are times when we're experiencing a failure. And if our leaders aren't there for us at times of failure, then we don't have a way or a mentor or a guide to get us through to the other side. And what I found is that failures or mistakes are just as an important set of teachings for us as are the successes.

9:13And so, you know, again, like kind of a militant or a rah-rah command and control style can work, but it's not a long-term sustainable way to really evolve and develop as human beings. Now, you use the word militant, and I can actually say I was an officer in the U.S. Army for eight years. And the officers that I respected and that I thought were most effective did not use a fear-based approach. A lot of officers did use a fear-based approach. And I think to your points that you've kind of made, it's that added stress. In the short term, it might have worked, but over time, the added stress and anxiety, you saw things fall apart, and you just saw people not operate in their highest capacity or in the way they could best.

10:05The officers that I saw have the most success were those that really were just inspiring, motivating, taking 100 % responsibility for everything, no matter if it was their fault or wasn't their fault. and I saw the soldiers below them in their chain of command just succeed and thrive. And that was a huge lesson I took away from my time in the U.S. Army. So it's just something to think about, Fire Nation, as you're going forward, that even in a place like the Army, and this was during a time of war. I mean, I was in Iraq for 13 months on a tour of duty. It's hard to think of a time and a place when fear-based leadership is actually effective for any length of time.

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13:49That's thought-leader.com slash fire. Amy, we're back, and I want to dive into the first step that people need to take in moving away from a fear-based leadership approach? I didn't just observe fear-based leadership from other people. Once I got to my middle stages of my career, that's when I was taking stock in my own behaviors, right? And realizing like, gosh, you know, you've done a lot to compete and win and climb the corporate ladder, but what behaviors have you adopted, Amy, that might be considered fear-based, right? And so the very first step is self-examination on understanding what are the core behaviors you show up with every day and doing just a little bit of discovery, pulling the thread and understanding kind of what is at the root of those behaviors?

14:46Are those behaviors coming from a place of protectionism or a place of insecurity? Or are those behaviors coming from a place of openness and love? So again, the first step is really taking a moment to pause and reflect on your own life and your own behaviors that you're showing up with. Amy, you believe that unlearning fear-based leadership is important for both the leaders and the employees. Tell us more about this from both perspectives. Yes. Well, so at my company, Authentics, our very first value of our core values is authenticity. And what I've learned about authenticity is that in order to be truly comfortable in our own skin, whether we are a leader or an employee in the kind of rank and file of a company, In order to be truly authentic, we have to be able to be vulnerable, right?

15:50And what that looks like from a leader's perspective is that you're willing to show up and say, I'm struggling here or I've made a mistake in this way and here's what I'm learning. It also includes asking your teammates like, hey, you might be an employee on my team. I'm asking you to hold me accountable because I'm working on identifying behaviors that might make you feel not a sense of safety. So it's a behavior that invites leaders really into becoming more authentic in their own skin by making it okay to be vulnerable. And for employees, right, coming into a workforce, you know, where they're asked to contribute, right, they have to be aware of their own sense of where they feel weak and be willing to vocalize that in a way that shows strength.

16:53Like, hey, I'm here to learn and grow and I'm asking for your help to learn and grow rather than trying to cover up those weaknesses because invariably they always come out. And so we always have to own our weaknesses so that we can be open about them and authentic about them. Fire Nation, so many great takeaways from today's episode. Again, all focused around eradicating fear-based leadership. And we talked about a lot of important stuff around this. What is the one key takeaway that you really want to make sure our listeners get from our conversation today? I think it all starts with really understanding what being your authentic self means.

17:37And what I have uncovered through my years of experience is fear does not exist really when we are in our true and full authentic self. And so if we are going through life experiencing anxiety or fear, or if we're displaying behaviors that other people feel turned off by or intimidated by, then we aren't there yet, right? We aren't living our true authentic self because, again, fear does not exist in our authentic selves. And so the takeaway is do your self-internal work, do some self-examination, and really uncover what's at the root of your behaviors on a day-to-day basis. Amy, if Fire Nation wanted to connect with you, your company, what is your call to action for our listeners today?

18:32Would love for you to connect with me on either LinkedIn or our website. It's authentics.com. That's the word, authentic. with an X at the end.com. We'd love to talk further about this. Fire Nation, you're the average. Of the five people you spend the most time with, you've been hanging out with AB and JLD today, so keep up that heat. For links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Type Amy in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up. Amy, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute you, and we'll catch you on the flip side.

19:11Thank you, John. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Amy for sponsoring today's episode. Fire Nation, successful entrepreneurs are great at three things, productivity, discipline, and focus. That's why I created the Mastery Journal so that you can master these three things in 100 days. And we're talking step-by-step. So visit themasteryjournal.com and I'll catch you there or on the flip side. business made simple hosted by donald miller is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals business made simple takes the mystery out of growing your business join my friend donald miller each week as he shares value bombs on topics like the secret to making better marketing decisions listen to business made simple wherever you get your podcasts ever thought of giving a tedx talk it's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world and four-time TEDx speaker Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there.

20:11Visit thought-leader.com to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions.