How history’s top leaders expand their spheres of influence and caring

The greatest of leaders shift the thinking and behaviors of those they lead in ways that cause more caring and more influence through competence. They transform the thinking of those they serve by shifting the language of the group from “I” to “We” thinking at scale. Their work transforms their followers into leaders, through language, by empowering them to each scale both caring and influence in their work. The most successful leaders craft language, create tools, and follow through with actions that allow their leadership to resonate for generations. Natural leaders have an uncanny ability to inspire others into action to create sustainable, long-lasting positive results. They do it by purposefully scaling both the capacity for influence and the capacity for caring in those they lead.

Great leaders profoundly scale the capacity for caring and the capacity for influence of the people they lead.

Some people are easily motivated by great leaders, but not all will follow. While a leader may build competence in his organization with data, facts, and tools that provide a source of motivation for many of their people toward positive, inspired action, there are sometimes people who are not inspirable. It may simply be that they are not ever going to be inspired by the same things as the leader. Or it may be worse. These people fake it, in order to appear to fit in, but deep down inside, one might sense that something isn’t quite right. There are people around us whose motivations are profoundly different from most. They may not be driven by the greater good. They simply care about selfish things. These folks are dangerous to any organization and threaten its success. If they are smart or have manipulated their way into leadership positions, they can be challenging to root out.

The problem for many of us is that these people are often highly intelligent, and their core motivations differ from the norm. They can be entertained when they are able to complexify and undermine the ideas of others. They might only be inspired by being in control of those in their purview. One thing is certain, these are people who lack authentic care and concern for the people around them. The best you might hope for with the folks I am describing is that they pretend they are along for the ride and produce some positive results along the way. But keep your eye on them, as they are lying in wait for their opportunity to undermine your operation for their own personal gain or to meet their need for control and manipulation. Maybe the world needs these folk. Maybe there is some mysterious value they serve in the master plan. Maybe they are simply one of those evil parts of nature that we aren’t meant to understand, like mosquitoes or the bubonic plague. It is imperative to understand how to identify these folks if we want to build a scalable organization that adds sustainable value to the world through inspired people.

Psychologists have different labels for these souls, some of whom lack a conscience. In the book, The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout clearly has shown us that as much as 4% of the population has some of these traits. When I read that statistic, it dawned on me that if we have over 200 employees in our organization, it is statistically possible that I might have as many as eight people that meet the criteria for this diagnosis working around me. I am an optimist. As such, my biases make me certain that our hiring practices and our culture are better than in most companies, so I find it highly unlikely that we have eight. But it is probable that we have at least a few of them. A real problem arises when these people find their way into leadership positions.

Many of us are acutely aware that dark and successful forms of leadership abound. How you define success, however, plays a critical role in describing the leadership function. These are people who have derived immense levels of success (as measured by traditional metrics of fame, power, clout, and wealth). This is a real problem, as Martha Stout described in her book, because successful sociopaths require a high degree of intelligence in order to appear functioning. Indeed, she found that successful sociopaths and psychopaths tend to be very intelligent. According to Forbes, they often find financial and career success, in part, due to their sociopathy. Their success serves to create an unfortunate positive feedback loop for their behaviors. I think of the #MeToo movement in this way. Look at all of these power-hungry attorneys, CEOs, and business leaders who behave so badly while our society puts up with them because they have figured out how to manipulate and control the system and the people around them. Those we consider great leaders, on the other hand, care deeply for the people around them. They see themselves as servants to the people they lead. They make decisions that are not the best for themselves to serve the greater good. They look out for their people and have an innate ability to create more caring and more empathy in those around them. At the extremes, the greatest leaders of our collective history suffer greatly and have been killed and martyred as a result of their leadership.

If we can codify this concept, it will be useful to others. The leaders around me can more quickly determine who to spend their time growing and who to watch carefully. They can use this concept to decipher and analyze their own leadership behaviors to drive their own improvement. In business, we can use this concept to identify which clients to run away from (and learn from) and which to protect and defend. We might do an even better job of hiring prospective employees who demonstrate great potential for good leadership while identifying those we should never hire. Above all else, we would have a more systematic and clear way of identifying our current stars and future leaders.

I have a deep-rooted belief that most of us are good people who are generally motivated in the ways described by the science of self-determination theory by Ed Deci and Richard Ryan. We seek agency and control in our own lives. We seek growth. We seek to connect and relate to others.

Ultimately, we all want to contribute to the world in some meaningful way that connects us to the people around us. The entire field of psychology is dedicated to figuring out and classifying the human motivations behind behavior. When we behave in ways that don’t jive with what we call “normal,” to each other, we get classified into some sort of disorder and we label it. There are more than 300 disorders listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-5). It occurs to me that all of these disorders describe how we appear to others or how we behave in the context of others.

If all psychology and “psycho-pathology” occurs in the context of how we relate to others, then our capacity for different forms of empathy must play a huge role in this classification system. It is useful to describe most of the disorders that impact us, at least all of those that I am familiar with, in terms of our capacities for empathy. There are many types of empathy as described in the literature. But they can be simplified by separating two distinct forms of empathy, in terms of our leadership capacities for fostering them.

The first form of empathy is our capacity for caring. Often referred to as affective empathy or empathic concern. Our capacity for caring exists on a broad continuum. Some people simply do not have the capacity to care for anyone else while others authentically tear up at the thought of another’s suffering. At the extreme lower end of the scale, some may not even have the capacity to care for themselves while at the other end of the spectrum, there are people who care deeply and are willing to personally sacrifice for others. The continuum that describes our capacity to care deepens and then broadens as we extend away from the self. Each of us may draw this diagram a little differently, but it looks something like this:

When we are babies, we are only concerned with ourselves. We scream when we are hungry or uncomfortable. We learn to smile at our caretakers when we feel loved. If we grow up in a healthy environment and have the right biology, we grow and evolve to care more and more and we learn the importance of caring for others as it is one of the main motivating forces in a healthy life. We also learn that there is a dominance hierarchy to whom we care for and to the depth of our caring. We simply care more for the people in our family than we care for the neighbors that we have never met. We care more for the people who work in our company than for those who we have not met, who work for our competitor. We are normal. While many of us would say that we care deeply about the world and everything in it, our behaviors may betray us. Most of us end up somewhere in the middle, with a healthy eye on our own personal maximization formula and our internally established hierarchy of those whom we care for. We care, but not so much that we are willing to be martyrs. We might like to take vacations and buy nice clothes for ourselves. We might stay focused on saving our money and putting our kids through college. We might be disciplined enough to grow our own retirement plans. But we don’t do these things for our neighbors or for our colleagues. We are all somewhat “normal” in that respect and we expect they are doing the same. Everyone draws the lines around their “spheres of caring” in different ways.

What great leaders do differently, is they expand the spheres of caring for those whom they lead. Through language and follow-through, they cause more caring to occur for the people within their spheres and they serve to expand the spheres to include more people. They set visions that are meaningful, positive, and optimistic. They enroll, engage and educate people purposefully so that they are more effective in making the world a better place, together. This is what sets them apart.

The second form of empathy is our capacity for influencing the behaviors of others. Leadership is often described solely in these terms, as the ability to influence, to cause change, or to make something happen that wouldn’t have otherwise happened. In popular business literature, this has been described as our ability to understand ourselves and others and to adjust our behavior in order to influence others. EQ (Emotional Intelligence) is a term that has been made popular in describing how this form of empathy works. Some other terms for this might be “cognitive empathy,” or “tactical empathy.” This capacity for influence also exists on a broad continuum. At the low end of the scale, we don’t even understand our own emotions, so we have no chance of identifying and adapting to the emotions of others. At the upper end, we may have an innate ability to cause a change in the behaviors of others. Linearly, it would look something like this:

Anyone who has raised children can recognize these lower levels. If we grow up in a healthy environment, our parents provide us with the necessary guardrails and teach us when we are being unreasonable. From that guidance, we learn how to self-regulate. As we get older, we quickly learn how to influence those around us to get the things we want. But our growth of these skills slows down, for most of us, when we begin to have our needs met. We continue to go through life misreading people, miscommunicating and as a result, we often fail to inspire others. As our capacity for influence expands and broadens, it gets more diffuse. We have less influence over the people on the outside than we have over the people closest to the middle of the diagram. If I were to draw it in spheres, it would look similar to what I drew for our capacity for caring:

When we have a high capacity for caring and we influence people, we call it inspiration. When we lack the capacity for caring and we influence people, we call it manipulation.

If we were to plot out a graph with these two capacities, some interesting patterns emerge. “Abnormal” conditions can be demonstrated on this graph, and it might look something like this:

This graph provides a simple tool to help identify where the people around you might be so that you might improve your ability to lead. Let’s take a look at some of the patterns that emerge on this graph, represented by the different colors.

In the bottom left, represented by the dark red area of the chart are the “takers” in our society. These are folks that don’t care much for people outside of their small sphere and they don’t develop much of a capacity to influence those around them. They don’t have much influence beyond the people they hurt achieving their gains, with the exception of the stories that are told about them. One corollary I see is in our prison systems. While studies differ in the exact percentage, it is clear that north of 20+% of the people in our prison systems can be diagnosed with some form of psychopathy. Fortunately, these people represent only between 1–2% of the general population.

In the bottom right portion of the chart live the dangerous folks. These are the people that Martha Stout described who are correlated to people with high I/Q. At the extreme, these are people who are able to use their cunning and intellect to achieve high degrees of influence. They learn to manipulate large groups of people or even whole societies writ large. Historical figures might include people involved in the highest echelons of the Nazi regime, Mao Zedong, Herod the Great, or Joseph Stalin who caused action at scale through their broad influence, not for the better. Some modern figures might include the inspirations for the #MeToo movement, which included some of the most powerful people in Hollywood for decades before they were caught and brought to justice. Another might be the father of the largest pyramid scheme in the history of mankind, who swindled thousands of people out of more than $50 Billion of their hard-earned cash over multiple decades, seemingly without remorse.

The upper left-hand portion of the chart represents people who may be high in their capacity for caring, but lack any significant ability to influence the people around them. I am certain that most of us know plenty of people who fit this bill. The danger to many of these folks is their vulnerability. They are ripe to be taken advantage of by those in the bottom right who yield the capacity for great influence. People very high in affect and caring may live life broke because all of their money goes to the latest charity that knocked on the door.

In the dead center of the chart, are most of us normal folk, myself included. We have a reasonable degree of both capacities, and we go about our days trying to influence those around us in normal ways. We behave, lead and influence the world without much thinking about how we are behaving. Very few people develop extreme capabilities on both of these scales. Some historical figures who are off the charts for both their capacity for caring and capacity for influence have had an immense, positive impact on the world.

They proved to inspire troves of people and sometimes entire societies. Some great examples of this are people like Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Mahatmas Gandhi, Maya Angelou, and Nelson Mandela. It is often the case that these people are classified as martyrs because they suffered greatly or gave up their own lives to benefit others. We would show these folks in the upper right-hand area of the chart.

In my observation, none of us are fully “normal.” We all have thoughts or tendencies that others might classify as abnormal. We all have good days, and we all have bad days. We all exist in a psychological reality that is not black nor white but wonderfully grey. We all might act like a sociopath in certain scenarios and an empath in others. The context of each scenario matters. In many ways, this is what makes our lives so complicated and so interesting at the same time. Most of us live somewhere in the middle of this chart but our behaviors show up all over the chart. If you are anything like me, for example, sometimes you wake up on the wrong side of the bed and simply don’t want to talk to anyone. On those days, I don’t feel like engaging my powers of influence and hence, don’t have much impact. Other days, I find myself at my “wit’s end” and have been known to tell my children that “Santa Claus is real. And if your room is not clean by the time I come upstairs….there might be a consequence.”

For most of us, there is an upper capability limit to both of these scales (caring and influence). Fortunately, most of us are somewhat “normal.” The most beautiful thing about all forms of empathy, and our leadership capacities for both caring and influence, is that they can be learned. These are not “fixed” traits. Once you recognize this, it can transform every aspect of your life for the better. If it can be learned, it can also be taught. It can be purposefully systematized and built into our daily practices. This knowledge can influence how we teach leadership systematically and result in better leadership behaviors. Our goals might even be created with these concepts in mind so that we inspire those around us to grow in both of these leadership dimensions while always being on the path of growing our own personal capacities for both caring and influence.

A pattern that I have seen in business supports this concept. Business leaders who create sustainable success, beyond their death in many cases, are those who cause shifts in how people think, communicate and behave.

They cause normal people, who come to work, to care more for each other, for their customers, for their shareholders, and for their communities while building sustainable influence through their products and services. They cause a clear shift from the bottom-left to the upper-right for the people in their charge.

Great business leaders cause a shift in normal people, causing more caring to occur while creating great influence through their products and services.

They can’t be in the extreme upper right-hand section of the chart, as they are not martyrs. Because we live in a capitalistic system, we must recognize the importance of profitability for the survival of their organization. Profitability is crucial in this environment because it provides the ability for leaders to double-down and reinvest in their people, customers, environments, communities, research and development, and the planet to maximize their long term impact. In the best cases, after all of these considerations, it can also return a significant amount of capital to shareholders.

To sum it up, it is useful to identify where your leadership behaviors might plot on this chart. It is also useful to see the patterns exhibited by the people around you through this chart so that you can grow and positively influence the people that you serve as a leader. It is also crucial to identify sociopathic behavior and those with high intelligence who might be motivated by abnormal things. They may be brilliant, but they are cold, manipulative culture destroyers that will limit your growth and create unnecessary politics in your organization. If it is your boss, hopefully, this will encourage you to find another gig. If it is that client or customer that you just can’t seem to make happy, maybe it’s time to fire them. It is as simple as figuring out how much they authentically care about the people around them. The difference between a great leader and a highly successful sociopath is whether or not they authentically care about those they influence. It lies squarely in their intent.

The difference between a great leader and a highly successful sociopath is whether or not they authentically care about those they influence.

In our organization, we run workshops for leadership teams to help them inspire their customers. In our workshops, we find that most companies have the complicated challenge of inspiring business leaders with access to funding to inspire highly talented employees on teams to build products and services that inspire customers, most of whom the leadership team will never meet. There are many conflicting incentives in that mix. To earn sustainable success, there are lots of different personalities to inspire. Having had the honor of building hundreds and hundreds of software products, over decades, has provided me the opportunity to get a lot of “reps” with both successful teams and a few epic failures. This experience has provided access to a wide array of different leadership styles to which to correlate success, both short term projects and over the longer timeframes associated with products and platforms. More recently, I have presented the leadership framework that I am describing in this article to over 1,000 CEOs and key executives around the world through professional roundtable groups. We can infer that they work for reasonably successful organizations that can afford to be a part of these groups. These experiences have given me the ability to validate these ideas across entire businesses in hundreds of industries. These workshops and presentations have been a laboratory for studying motivation, group dynamics, and finding ways to communicate what constitutes great leadership while contrasting it with poor leadership.

We all set about to organize and categorize the world to make sense of what we see. This is an attempt to make the world a little better than it was yesterday. If you decide to apply this to your work and thinking, remember the words of one of the greatest statisticians who has ever roamed the earth:

If you found this framework and model useful. Please clap, recommend my article or share it with your community. I would love to hear from you.

References:

Eisenhower Matrix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower_Method.

“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.” — Daniel Goleman.

Daniel Goleman’s book, Focus, discusses open awareness: https://www.amazon.com/Focus-Hidden-Excellence-Daniel-Goleman/dp/1408829118

The story of Post-It Notes from 3M: https://www.post-it.com/3M/en_US/post-it/contact-us/about-us/.

Making your sticky notes stick: I was shown this technique by a few consultants in my travels. The earliest reference I can find online to the technique in our industry is here: http://blog.whitehorses.nl/2013/05/17/how-to-stick-a-sticky-note/ There are also several

YouTube videos showing how to do it properly. Here is one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkWV-MAxsLE.

There are many prioritization schemes out there which attempt to provide more rigor to the process. Here are a few:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requirement_prioritization.
• https://www.processimpact.com/articles/prioritizing.pdf.
• https://www.agilebusiness.org/page/ProjectFramework_10_MoSCoWPrioritisation.
• Fibonacci Scale (Sequence): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number.
• Avians Kaushik first referenced The HiPPO in his book on Web Analytics: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0470130652/.
• Bohm, David, “On Dialog” | Bohm’s On Dialog is a masterwork on group problem solving and participatory thought.