Good Authority. Jonathan Raymond
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is teaching it is because it doesn’t fit into neat boxes. It’s messy. It’s personal. It’s about who we think we are, who we find out we are when we get into relationships with other people, and the long and winding road that it takes to close the gap between the two. This discovery was also bringing me to the end of my own long and winding road, the one I started all those years before when I left the law firm in New York. I had finally closed the gap in my life between the personal me and the professional me, which never should have been there in the first place.
When I did, that voice started stirring in me again, telling me it was time to move on. I saw the potential in those moments, in the possibility that the line we’ve been keeping between personal and professional growth—the line I was keeping in myself all those years—was not only artificial, but the very thing preventing us from creating the cultures we really want. It was time for me to take the risk, to create a platform for these ideas and see what would happen. That integration of personal and professional growth has become my life’s work. It’s what we teach at refound.com and it’s what the rest of this book is about.
Leaving my team was hard. But in the Spring of 2015 I decided that it was time for me to go out on my own. I wondered whether I could make a business out of doing just this one thing: If I could create a new kind of consultancy, a mentoring company of sorts, to teach others to apply these ideas for themselves. With the incredible curiosity and passion of a small group of clients who were there with us at the beginning, we were off.
I wrote this book to share with you the ideas—both the philosophical framework and the tactical skills—that our clients are using to change things where they work. They are people just like you: team leaders, senior managers, and C-level executives—consultants and coaches too. In the pages to come you’ll be hearing from them through stories and dialogues that will help you see how much power you have to change the world where you work, no matter where on the org chart you sit.
You’ll find all the free Good Authority tools and resources at refound.com/resources
This is not a rulebook, and it doesn’t describe a linear process. It offers a new management theory and a set of skills you can test out, and decide for yourself if they work. It’s a way of leading and managing a team that applies no matter what industry you’re in, no matter how big or small your team. Take the time to go in order if you can. Feel free to skip ahead and come back if one of the later chapters jumps out at you. I’ll meet you in the middle.
Good Authority
We teach best what we
most need to learn.
—Richard Bach
When I was eleven years old I went with my mother to work for the day. Her office was a college classroom. She was a psychology professor at a local university. As fate would have it, on that particular day, the discussion turned to a question that cut to the heart of why men do the things they do. “Why is it,” she asked the room full of undergraduates “that, even when they’re lost, men won’t ask for directions?”
The class chuckled. They gave it their best shot. Of course, I thought I had a better answer. I tightened my grip on my Aquaman lunchbox to bolster my confidence. I raised my hand and waited for her to notice. Not surprisingly, she did. “Well,” I said to warm myself up, “the reason men don’t ask for directions is so … that way … when they figure it out they get to be the hero.” As you can imagine, I’ve never lived that one down.
As much mileage as it got as a family anecdote over the years, there was something else going on there. There were at least three things I see now in the naive words of that eleven-year-old boy. The first was that I was expressing a belief about authority, about what I thought it means to be of value to others, that would become my life’s work three decades later. The second was that this phenomenon had nothing to do with gender. In the work I do every day with our clients, I see female leaders and managers struggle with it just as much as us menfolk. And the third—what was obvious to my mother and probably everyone else in the room—was that I was talking about myself.
The belief many of us have as we try to figure out what it means to truly lead a team of people is this: What makes us valuable, what gives us authority and credibility in the eyes of others, is our ability to solve problems and reach goals. The theory of this book is that the opposite is true. That the highest form of leadership, the most value you can add—to your team, your organizations, and to the world around you—is to develop the strength to not give people the answers. Rather, your job is to create a space where they can discover the answers for themselves, where you become a resource for them to reach their destination. If you make the pivot, you’ll find that 90 percent of the symptoms and struggles that overwhelm your day right now will start to disappear.
That’s what it means to be a Good Authority. It’s about becoming a true mentor to the people on your team. And I’ll argue that solving your team’s problems for them is not only not the solution, it is the hidden cause of many of those problems in the first place. It’s why people don’t own their work. It’s why they make sloppy mistakes and don’t care about the customer in the ways you want. And it’s why every single meeting you have ends with talking about how people need to communicate better.
Good Authority is based on three core principles that we’ll be teasing out and developing along the way. As you embark on the rest of this journey, keep them in mind. Let them work on you. If you’re anything like me, they can be a source of growth to you for years to come, helping you re-evaluate old assumptions about what it means to lead, about the purpose of work, and giving you permission to challenge people to go beyond where they are today.
1 The deepest purpose of a business is to change the lives of the people who work there.
2 The role of leaders and managers is to show people how professional and personal growth are inseparable.
3 The way to get people to be engaged is to be more engaged with them.
Now a few words about what Good Authority is not. This is not a book about achieving great wealth or tripling your sales this quarter—though I’ll be the first to congratulate you if you do. It’s not a substitute for the many other things you can do to humanize your business, like improving benefits packages, offering more flexible hours and remote work options, and so on. It’s a call to invest in a process that speaks to a different level: to our experience of work itself. To go all in with each person on your team. To discover who they are, what they’re about, and how you can help them grow.
Before we move on, we need to reframe the question the coaching and consulting industry has taught business leaders to ask. The right question isn’t “How do I get my people to engage?” The right question is: “How can I get better at engaging with them?”
This book is for anyone with a passion to change the status quo, anyone who believes that the world—your world—can be better than it is. It’s for leaders and managers in any industry, for-profit business, or not-for-profit business. Above all, it’s for anyone who has the awesome responsibility of having authority over another human being’s paycheck. This is a book about caring—for the heart, spirit, and financial future of the people in your charge.
What you’ll find throughout are methods and tools to help you have a new kind of conversation with each person on your team. I encourage you to use the tools as you see fit, to trust yourself, to make mistakes and learn. It isn’t magic, though I hope it sometimes feels that way. It won’t turn everyone on your team into a perfect team player overnight. You may get it wrong more times than you get it right. But if you invest in the journey, if you seek out feedback on how you’re doing from people you trust, and keep working at it, something amazing can happen to you.
Here’s a short overview of what you’ll