Interview: Chris McAlister: "Great leadership is like great parenting - it's all about preparing for when you're not there"

In the latest FS interview, Chris McAlister of SightShift talks about leadership, rituals, the dangers of prolonged adolescence and why he thinks about the Greeks every day!

This is the latest in a regular series of in longform, in-depth, Q&A-style interviews on Fee Sheet. If this is your first time here, check out this post about what this publication aims to do, and this one about pricing. All interviews are posted on a 50/50 system. The first half — often several thousand words — will be available for free. The rest, and most other content, is for paying subscribers.

Now, on with the interview!

Chris McAlister is an author, speaker, and leadership coach based in Columbus, Ohio. He is the founder of SightShift, a leadership development company that helps company owners achieve their 3-5-year goals by developing leaders at scale.

He’s the author of eight books on leadership development and has delivered his transformational process globally to leaders of various industries, including small and mid-market company founders, physicians, Fortune 100 executives, venture fund managers, serial entrepreneurs, professional athletes, and nonprofit directors.

Chris McAlister of SightShift

In this wide-ranging interview, you will learn:

• To consider the greater intelligence beyond ourselves

• The three central characteristics of great leadership

• How wilderness moments can reveal your identity

• What to do when you’re starting from scratch

• The stark dangers of prolonged adolescence

• Why ours is not an especially volatile period

• Why good leadership is like good parenting

• Why insecure leaders ruin the world

• How to lead in a healthy way

• The meaning of peace

• And lots more

Shane Breslin: 

Chris, it’s good to be with you again. I'd like to start with your business, SightShift. You run SightShift Leadership Academy and the heading on the homepage of your website is “We develop leaders who develop leaders”. So what is leadership? How do you define it?

Chris McAlister:

I love it. It’s good to be here. So, at its essence, leadership is how you leave something. We often think of leadership as the act of presence, but ultimately, it's how you leave it. Most leaders aren't thinking about that in terms of their energy, their effort, their initiative or their systems. This is why the parenting analogy is so powerful. Ninety-nine percent of what a healthy leader would do is what a healthy parent would do. One of my daughters is moving out this summer. And she’s let us know that she won't be back. Not in a negative way — she’s running to her ambition and her fullness. If we have led her as parents, then we have raised her to release her and enjoy a lifelong adult relationship with her. So at its core, leadership is about how you leave something, and about how you're preparing for the leaving. How you're preparing for when you're no longer there. Now, I have a question that I've learned to ask myself the last few years that helps me make sure I'm doing it in a healthy way. But that’s what I think leadership is, at its essence.

“That's why I love business so much. Business provides a concrete place to learn principles that change your life.”

SB: 

You teed me up! What's the question you ask yourself?

CMcA:   

It’s

“Am I leading right now for impact or for validation?”

That's the simplest way I can bring myself back to: why am I doing this?

Why am I bringing this energy into this team meeting? Why am I writing this book? What am I trying to influence with this idea, or by coaching this person, or by having this conversation with my wife? Am I doing this for my own validation — something I want comforted about who I am, or something I want to avoid having taken from me? Or am I here to give something?

Don’t get me wrong. I'm not altruistically perfect. It’s not 0 or 100. It’s more like 51/49. That’s why I’m here today speaking with you. I know that at my core, at 51% or greater, I'm here to serve you and to serve your audience and your readers. Do I want to get something out of it? Sure! I'd love the flow of our conversation to teach me something that I'd like to learn, to help me get more clarity. And maybe this piece of work will connect with people who buy my books or listen to my podcasts or we get to work together in the future. But at the core, I am here to serve. And I think that one question is what I've found to be most helpful over and over again.

SB:   

I’ve heard you talk before about “proving or hiding”. Is this question related to proving and hiding?

CMcA:   

Very astute. So the center point is: Am I leading for impact or validation? Then, if I find that I'm leading for validation, it's going to show up either as proving or hiding.

If I'm not leading for impact, if I find that I’m seeking validation, then let's think that through... I could try to hide here. I could try to avoid some of the questions you ask and avoid being truthful. Or I could try to prove. I could insecurely try to hype something up or convince or distort details to try to deceive. That's just in the context of our conversation, but you can apply proving and hiding to anything.

SB:  

About this question of leading for impact or leading for validation, when you look out into the world, and consider the people that we might think of in terms of “leaders” — whether it's leaders of sports teams or coaches or political leaders — as a leadership coach and owner of a business that, in your words, “develops leaders who develop leaders”, how do you judge the level of leadership out there in the world? If you were to make a rough guess about the number of leaders who are leading for impact and how many are leading for validation, what would you say?

CMcA:   

What a killer question! I don't have to guess. There is plenty of research on this, from people like Jim Collins in the business world and you could look in the academic world to Robert Kegan and adult development.

It's 3%.

Three percent of adults get to the point that they're consistently leading for impact, not validation. About 60% of adults are triangulating not from an identity they possess on their own, but from what others think of them. “Do you like me? Am I doing a good job?”

Another 30% get to a point that they define themselves by who they're not. They're angry. They don't know who they are, but they’ll tell you who they're not. And they don't consciously process it or express it clearly. About 3% get to a point where they can listen to that gentle nudge — the whisper, the guidance, the upgraded intuition — of learning who they really are, so they can lead from there.

“If you're secure in who you are, you’re not worried about the legacy you leave.”

SB:   

Wow. So on that 3% — those people we might think of as great leaders, people who empower and inspire the people alongside them to take greater action and create greater impact — do you think they’re mostly born or mostly made?

CMcA:   

The way we’ve traditionally thought about this, we think it's born. The ability to be charismatic, to be persuasive and winsome. But I don't think that's the ancient wisdom. Looking at societies for thousands of years — I totally nerd out on this! — we can come upon a definition of world-class leadership, and it has three characteristics.

The thing I like to express with this is, look at how much the world has advanced in terms of commerce and trade. We can measure things financially, right? It's an amazing thing that I'm drinking some coffee from another country, and it’s so good, and I enjoy it. But the point of this is, there are three characteristics, and we're aiming to provide a definition that’s as clear as credit and debit is in financial terms.

“When times are really good, you can sell vitamins. When times are bad, you have to be able to sell a pain reliever.”

So number one, they know how to make their own meaning. Another way you could say it is that they receive meaning. They learn how to cooperate with their intuition and what's happening in and around them. They don't need an external source defining them and telling them who they are, or telling them they’re doing a good job.

You can enjoy those things without needing them. Rare is the person who isn't looking to the group for conforming affirmation. Think about Rene Girard’s mimetic theory — most of us are copying what we think we want. At SightShift we see this all the time with leaders. We tend to serve best in an organization that's somewhere between about $30 million to $2 billion in turnover, where they get the full impact of our solutions. It's profound to me that most executive leaders aren't really leading. They’re doing things through envy and comparison. They’re watching other businesses. Their consciousness is getting pinged with anxiety, so they come into the team meeting going, “This is what we got to do, we gotta go here, we gotta do this!”

That’s the first thing. Making your own meaning. Number 2, if you’re not making your own meaning, you can't discern true direction. They’re not able to really make sense of who they are, so they don't understand where they are and what to do next. Those leaders who we define as world-class leaders make their own meaning and they discern true direction.

And lastly, number three, they continually renew relationships.

Relationships renew, they go deeper. If I know the truth of who I am, it changes how I'm showing up, which causes a restructuring or realigning of relationships. I’ve walked through restructuring relationships with my kids multiple times, and it's not dramatic. You don't sit down and talk about it and say, “Hey, we’re relating differently now!” I’ve never done that with my wife in 24 years of marriage. I don't sit down and say, “Let’s restructure our relationship!”

But that's why I love business so much. Business provides a really concrete place to learn these principles that change your life. But most people aren't doing that. They're not in a place where they know who they are, what they should do, and how that structures relationships.

“If we could all carry our relationship with ourselves in a joyful way, we would find that our internal world is endlessly explorable. My dreams, fantasies and desires are all experiences I'm having on this road trip with myself.”

SB:   

When I think of leaders I’ve been in the presence of, there’s one in particular who comes to mind. CEO of a very successful company, been around for 35, 40 years, very successful in its industry. But when I spent time with him, he definitely came across as someone who was leading for validation. He was emotionally fragile. Very easily offended, and a loose cannon in his decision-making. But when we spoke he said to me that his last remaining objective was to leave a legacy. And that word — legacy — came to mind when you were talking about leaders who lead for impact. So my question: do you think the desire for legacy is a part of both sides, that it’s present in people who lead for impact and in people who lead for validation?

CMcA:   

We ask this a lot at the beginning of relationships with businesses. We tend to start with the CEO, founder, owner. And we ask if they’ve considered the legacy they’re going to leave. We’re trying to connect to something inspirational and aspirational, but the truth is, if you're secure in who you are, you're not worried about the legacy that you leave. You're so invested in it that it doesn't matter. It’s a case of:

“I don't have to be remembered a certain way. I want you to be impacted.”

I joke about this with the kids a lot. My kids, three daughters, will be 22, 20, and 18 this year. They know my favorite band, and they know the song I want played at my funeral. And I want the speakers to be great that everyone can hear and be moved by the music. The message of that song has nothing to do with me. It's just about the message my life is dedicated to. So I don't really care about my legacy. I just want them to have a profound experience of their own, knowing who they are.

What happens to a lot of people is this. They start thinking about the end of their life and then start to consider how to make it so they’re not forgotten. And that’s definitely more from a place of validation than impact — they’re afraid of being forgotten. There’s a flipside to this! Because if that didn't happen, we wouldn't have a lot of the hospitals and buildings and universities we have! Because lots of that funding come from “Please don't forget me!”

I don't mean to be harsh with that. Some people are doing it from an altruistic place, of 51% or greater impact. But for sure, there are the others too who are just trying not to be forgotten.

SB:   

Of course, I want to know the band and the song is. The one you want played at your funeral. You don't have to tell me, but I have to ask!

CMcA:   

This will take us on another path, which I would love. The band is Manchester Orchestra. They’re an indie rock band out of Atlanta, Georgia, with about three million monthly listeners on Spotify. Andy Hull, the main guy, is a metaphorical monster. His creative process is amazing. How he wakes up and his mind is able to download and receive a character state. And he writes out of that state. The song is called “The Grocery”. It's a mystical song about this idea of, “What's the unseen reality?”

We think we've reduced everything down to the material. But what's the unseen reality? It's the struggle of faith and journey and becoming, contextualized in this powerful metaphor of a story.

SB:  

One more question on leadership, and that’s self-leadership. When we think of leaders, we often think of a leader as who they are in relation to other people. How do you think about self-leadership?

CMcA:  

It’s true, we do often think of leadership in terms of the role given to us by someone else. “Now I have to lead others.”

I think about this in terms of a tree. The fruit of the tree is the relationships the leader has with other people. The trunk of the tree is the role the leader has — and that might be one given to them by someone else. And the root of the tree is the leader's relationship to themselves. It’s their being.

For example, if someone becomes a parent for the first time, they now have a new role and a new relationship, but they don’t typically get into the root system trying to work out who they are at the core that wears the role of parent. If I forget the difference between being and doing, then when my kids don't act like I think they should, I might either get insecure and try to control their behavior, or get too passive. What happens there is I'm leading for my own validation — I just want to feel good about who they are and how they behave.

A lot of leaders don’t have the right relationship to themselves first, at the root of who they are. But the truth is, if we could all carry that in a joyful way, we’d find that our internal world is endlessly explorable. My dreams, fantasies and desires are all experiences I'm having on this road trip with myself.

Then, out of that right relationship to myself with the root system, I show up much healthier and stronger in the role, which yields greater fruit in the relationships I have.

SB: 

It always starts with you, right?

CMcA:

Yes. It begins with you first. No one is going to come do this work for you. Carl Jung said the unlived life of the parent is the child's greatest struggle. Who you are, what you've been through, your experiences — they're all things to be processed and thought through.

Because you have a choice. You can bring the beautiful gift of who you are into leadership. Or you can bring the tears, the indifferences, the challenges that make people's lives harder. Insecure leaders ruin the world. And we all have insecurities, so we’ve all got some work to do.

“I had taken a screenshot from the movie ‘The Pursuit of Happyness’ where Will Smith is sleeping in the subway bathroom with his kid. That was my screensaver. I don’t care who Will Smith slaps, that story saved me.”