Why You're Failing To Have The Success You Want As A Leader
Hint, It Has Nothing To Do With Your Abilities
Why You’re Failing To Have The Success You Want As A Leader
Hint, It Has Nothing To Do With Your Abilities
Written by a human, for humans, always.
I have worked with leaders as a coach...
From starting entrepreneurs to within organizations with thousands of employees...
To being asked to become a United Nations Representative based on my ability to help leaders...
For 10 years now.
One thing that I have encountered...
Over and over again...
Is that so many individuals have “done” leadership development...
But...
It has not worked for them.
Not at a significant level.
Not to the heights that they believe they are capable of.
Indeed...
When you look at the statistics...
It is not surprising.
80% of leadership development completely fails...
With “limited” success the remainder of the time.
Why?
The vast majority of leadership development programs fall into two categories...
Skill Development Focus...
Or Psychological Focus.
Here is the thing...
For the vast majority of people I have worked with...
Neither of these is their problem.
They know what they are supposed to do in which situation...
They know the right types of things to say when...
They have the right mindset...
They have the capability to be excellent leaders...
Yet...
They fail to have the success they want as a leader.
The reason...
Is because neither their skills nor their psychology is the problem.
You can do all of these things...
Even do them well...
And still absolutely fail.
So then the question becomes...
Why are you continuing to fail as a leader?
This is the question that many have come to me asking...
Frustrated...
By all the money they have wasted.
I get it.
The leadership development industry itself is mostly in a silo...
Falling into repetition bias...
Convincing others that the methodologies work through that same bias...
While highlighting individual success...
Which they claim “proves” their methodologies...
But it is truly a consequence of survivorship bias...
And really, their examples are only exceptions to the rule.
However...
The numbers do not lie.
80% rate of complete failure.
So that is where my work really began...
Seeking to answer this question...
Which led me to become a Hall of Fame Leadership Coach.
So...
What is it that causes so many leaders to fail to have the success they want?
There are always going to be individual reasons...
Requiring coaching to navigate...
But these are the main reasons that I have found.
The first is burnout...
Which is impacting over 80% of the workforce.
This is the psychophysiological condition...
Where, based on the research...
Our Productivity Potential drops to 5% or less...
And yes...
We can and frequently do go into Negative Productivity.
The bigger problem is that while we are in burnout...
We actually cannot learn, master, and create habits of new skills or thinking patterns.
Our body literally loses the capacity to do it at any significant level.
Meaning...
That if you are currently in any level of burnout...
All the effort of learning most leadership development...
Will naturally fail.
The bigger problem...
Is that burnout requires proper recovery.
How much recovery?
For low levels of burnout...
The body needs a minimum of 3 weeks of significant recovery...
And for more significant cases...
As is the reality many face in today’s world...
It can take over a year of recovery.
But the problems do not end here.
What else can be at play?
Challenges with energy (Mg-ATP).
This is the energy that is created in the body to utilize for whatever purposes we need.
This can play out in two ways...
Which for many people, combine making the problem worse.
They either are wasting energy (Mg-ATP) in ways they do not realize...
Are failing to produce enough energy (Mg-ATP) to meet the demands of their lives.
This becomes far more nuanced because it can be played out in many different ways.
It could be from a lack of micronutrients that are needed to create energy...
It could be from too much of a micronutrient, which causes the body to react in many unfavorable ways (common with iron overload in today’s world)...
It could happen from parts of our body working ineffectively...
Including mitochondrial dysfunction...
Physiological imbalances...
And more.
The reason that I became a Triple Board-Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner was so that I could help clients evaluate where they may be facing these challenges...
And help them get the physiological energy that is needed to reach their goals.
So many people...
Without realizing it...
Are in extreme energy (Mg-ATP) deficits...
And all of the choices that they make end up making it worse.
But there are still other problems that I find with clients.
The next has to do with our Identity.
Now...
You may be saying that “Identity” has to do with Psychology...
But it actually has to do with much more than just our psychology.
It also has to do with our environment and how we interact with it.
It has to do with our skills and beliefs.
It has to do with how well our entire psychophysiology is interacting and whether every aspect is aligned...
Which goes into something that I call the “Brain Trap”.
See...
When most people think about these subjects...
They limit their understanding, consciously or subconsciously, to their brain...
But how we think and interact with the world...
What we believe we are capable of or incapable of...
Who we believe ourselves to be...
Requires us to understand more than our brain.
When you dive deep into the psychophysiology...
You can discover that you actually have 4 Cognition Systems...
Of which the Brain is only one of the systems...
A powerful system...
But it does not act alone.
If these 4 systems are not aligned...
And our Identity is not what guides it...
Then we become disjointed and unable to reach our goals.
This is often why Mindsets do not work...
It is not enough...
Which is why I work on Wayset with clients.
It is aligning all of our Cognition Systems...
With our Core Identity.
See...
When you dive into the Identity challenge...
You come to discover two problems specific to identity.
People are mostly only aware of Transitory Identities...
Which inevitably change...
Causing gigantic issues when we know no other identities...
And...
We also attempt to live out different identities in different places...
Causing what functionally becomes multiple personality disorder.
The challenge here is also related to the energy problem...
Because each identity we create has to be “maintained” and “separate”...
Where each has different rules of what is and is not acceptable in different places...
Which requires energy (Mg-ATP) to maintain.
The classic example here is the father who has a “work identity” and “home identity”...
Which one day breaks down when the father yells at their child like they would an employee...
Because they lacked the energy (Mg-ATP) to maintain the boundaries between the different identities that they have designed.
This is a really simple example...
But it becomes vastly more nuanced and plays out in ways that people never even realized were possible...
And in ways that require us to understand more than just our psychology.
Which brings us to another common challenge leaders face...
The Nervous System.
What many people do not realize...
Is that the Nervous System actually has a memory storage system...
Seperate from the Brain’s system...
Which can, and frequently does, cause many problems for people.
Now the challenge here...
Is that you cannot “think” your way out of these.
The way the Nervous System works is functionally different from the Brain.
How different?
In research around PTSD, Traditional Therapy (Brain-Focused), and Nervous System Work...
There had been people with extreme levels of PTSD (such as from war), who had been engaged in Traditional Therapy for years without any progress...
Who were able to completely and medically resolve their PTSD...
Within 6 sessions...
With a success rate of over 80% of participants...
Without any remission after 6 months.
Why?
Because the challenges that they were experiencing with their PTSD...
Were not occurring in their brains...
But their Nervous System.
Now, PTSD “may” be an extreme example for many leaders’ situations...
But I have discovered that many people have different levels of challenges that exist within their Nervous Systems...
This then creates further problems in their work capacities as leaders.
What this means...
Is that you need to understand what is a brain challenge...
What is a Nervous System challenge...
Where overlap may exist...
And how to resolve them both.
This has been a significant area of research and practice for me over the past few years...
Because it is a significantly larger challenge in today’s world than most people realize.
I have learned multiple modalities to help people in this respect...
Which help in different ways and capacities.
This is not the end of our list of challenges for leaders, though
What is next?
All of these problems may not be limited to an individual...
But it could be occurring at a team...
Or even at the organizational level.
The challenge here...
Is that you need to now identify multiple psychophysiological challenges...
Existing within different people...
And perhaps more importantly...
Between different people.
See...
Many of the challenges we have discussed...
Are not solely individual problems.
They frequently become group problems...
Exasperating and dragging others into these problems together.
A great example here is Burnout.
Most people talk about Burnout as an individual problem...
That they attempt to resolve at an individual level.
But when you actually look into the psychophysiology more deeply...
Individual Burnout...
Can expand into Group Burnout...
Where people’s psychophysiology is directly interacting with each other...
Such as through the electromagnetic fields generated by the heart...
Causing others to be “pulled” into burnout...
And which can begin to “trap” others in burnout.
This is a reason why someone with burnout can go on vacation...
“Begin” to feel better (though they have not fully recovered)...
Then, when they come back into the environment, “immediately” be back to the same levels of burnout they were experiencing before they left.
The reason...
Is that, on average, 80% of the workplace is in some level of burnout...
And individuals are keeping each other there simply by being in the same vicinity as each other.
If you fail to take this into account...
You will fail to have success as a leader.
You need solutions that allow multiple people within the organization to escape these problems together.
Which brings us to our last challenge for leaders...
They are often working within a business model...
That inherently fails to take human psychophysiology into account...
And that makes many of the above problems worse.
I have called these business models a number of things...
Machine business models...
Zombie business models...
Extractionary business models...
But they all lead to the same problem...
They create challenges...
Because they do not factor human psychophysiology into how they are designed.
This is why in some places...
Such as India and China...
We have watched these business models become the “literal” cause of death...
Medically diagnosed...
For leaders and employees.
These models function in such a way...
That eventually...
It creates internal deterioration...
That over time...
Become a hidden cause of many of the problems we see.
What does this mean?
For some organizations...
They need to rethink how they operate as a business...
Completely.
Now...
This may sound extreme...
But let me put it in a different perspective to help you see how logical it actually is.
If your workforce is in Burnout...
Everyone, individually, is working at 5% or less of their productivity capacity.
(Group Burnout actually compounds problems, making them significantly worse, but let’s keep the numbers simple for now.)
Let’s say that this means that each day you need to create 20 units...
And at a 5% productivity capacity...
Assuming no one is in negative productivity...
Each individual can only create 1 unit.
How many people do you need?
20 people to reach the 20-unit goal.
So that is 20 wages that need to be paid...
Workspace for those 20 people...
Likely benefits for them...
Not to mention that as teams grow, you usually need more support staff, managers, etc.
Again, that is still assuming that these individuals are not dropping into Negative Productivity...
Which is common in Burnout...
And assuming that those negative results are not being compounded through Group Burnout dynamics...
Which is also common in today’s world.
But...
What happens if you are able to redesign the business model...
So that instead of creating Burnout...
You simply create “average” employees based on health?
Well...
Then each individual’s Productivity Potential rises to 20%.
That is what the research shows “should” be the average human person...
Which, honestly, is likely an overstatement because the “average” has deteriorated in recent research, but again, we’re going to keep it simple.
This suddenly means that each individual goes from being able to create 1 unit...
To create 4 units...
This means that instead of 20 employees...
You only need 5...
But better...
They are actually healthier and happier.
It still gets better...
Because we have not even gotten to Flow States.
Flow is the psychophysiological state of being where we feel our best and perform our best.
Flow States...
Are the only place...
Where we can reach 100% of our Productivity Potential.
Assuming...
You know how to get into them consistently...
Which most people do not...
And is not how most workplaces are designed to help humans attain...
Only then are you going to be at 100% Productivity Potential consistently.
This means that to hit the same 20-unit goal...
You would only need...
1 employee.
As opposed to the 20 in Burnout.
It still gets better though...
Because if you actually design the workplace to help employees get into Flow States consistently...
Just as Group Burnout compounds into significantly worse results...
Group Flow compounds into significantly better results.
So if you hire 2 employees...
Who are in Group Flow together, consistently...
They are actually going to create “more” than 40 units together in total...
While a competitor who is stuck in Group Burnout...
Will likely struggle to even get 20 units total with 20 employees...
Either requiring them to...
Miss marks...
Demand more of their current employees, making the situation significantly worse...
Or hiring more employees when most organizations are struggling with headcount already.
Can you see how the dynamics change if you actually create a business around human psychophysiology...
Instead of against it?
This is also not theoretical...
I have worked with leaders to accomplish this in their organizations.
When you actually understand the entirety of human psychophysiology...
When you help unlock that in individuals...
Within teams...
And you design businesses around this...
Suddenly, you completely change the face of what becomes possible.
There are reasons you are not having the success you want as a leader...
But to obtain the success you want...
You need to approach leadership in a completely different way...
Which is why I call the work I do with people “Sageship”.
It is not a “different” leadership model...
It fundamentally is a different way of approaching business altogether...
One that feels tremendously better...
While simultaneously creating significantly better results.
If that is something that you are interested in unlocking in your life today...
Send me an email: Cody@TheLeadership.Guide
To Your Sageship,
Cody
P.S. - It can be Difficult to Figure Out How To Achieve…
Stress Optimization
Psychophysiological Freedom
An Exemplar Wayset
If you want Aid on the Path to Sageship, let me know - I’ll be Your Coach and Guide.
Just Send Me A Message.