The Rise and Costs of Leader B Mode

For the last two decades, I’ve been an executive coach working right alongside leaders and professionals in a wide variety of industries, roles, and stages of career. While my clients work for companies of different sizes and stages of growth, the one commonality among them all is that our coaching sessions are composed of some combination of celebrating Leader A successes and problem-solving for Leader B challenges. I know this dynamic well—like many of the folks I work with, I’m a full-time working parent as well as a leader of a growing firm. I’m walking the same tightrope, wanting to make a difference and achieve big goals while managing the inevitable stress and accountabilities of today’s leadership demands.

While leadership will always involve some combination of Leader A and Leader B, over the past twenty years I’ve observed an escalation of conditions that increase the likelihood of Leader B mode. We’re living in a time of rapid change, when a frenetic pace and an overfull plate are the norm—and sometimes even the ideal. Explicitly or implicitly, we’re encouraged to work harder and faster and to put in more hours—all while technology and industry disruption are evolving more quickly than ever. It’s no wonder that much of how business is conducted today has created a rising trend of Leader B days. Here are some of the most common challenges I hear:

• “Work is now 24-7. I’m never ‘off,’ even on the rare occasions I take personal time.”
• “Since my promotion, I’m accountable for so much more. My boss says I need to rethink how I spend my time and energy and make sure I’m not in the weeds. I’m not even sure where to begin.”
• “There’s no time to do the things that matter, like develop my own skills or mentor others.”
• “Everything is becoming so much more complex so quickly that I’m worried I can’t keep up.”
• “Imagining the future has become a luxury my division can’t afford. We’re all just trying to stay on top of the daily grind.”
• “How do I maintain my own levels of motivation, much less my team’s? I’m so tired.”

With challenges like these, today’s leaders risk falling into periods of disillusionment, ineffectiveness, dissatisfaction, and frustration. The cost of being stuck in Leader B mode is quite high; if left unchecked, it can even be career-ending. Here are some of the costs I’ve observed:

• CAREER DISSATISFACTION AND BURNOUT: Research shows that one in five highly engaged employees risks burnout, and that rather than experiencing greater satisfaction or joy, those most in demand often end up with the lowest engagement and career satisfaction over time.¹ A Deloitte survey of one thousand full-time employees in the United States found similar results: 77 percent had experienced burnout, even though 87 percent of respondents reported having “ ‘passion for their job.’ ” In fact, among this latter group of highly engaged workers, 64 percent said they were frequently stressed. At the same time, nearly seven in ten people (69 percent) said they felt their employer “does not do enough to minimize burnout,” while one in five (21 percent) said they don’t believe their employer offers any stress-reduction programs.² All of this adds up to a lot of Leader B days, and many of us wonder if the day-to-day sacrifices are even worth it.
• STALLED CAREERS AND THE INABILITY TO SCALE: Most of us want to get promoted, take on more significant roles, and achieve more. However, I’ve seen folks stuck in Leader B mode who stall out as their organizations grow, and they can’t keep pace. My colleague and good friend Betty Hung, an operating principal of Vista Equity Partners and one of the most senior women in the private-equity industry, once summed up this reality so well: “When you get promoted to bigger roles with new and greater responsibilities, you have to reinvent yourself (over and over) and accelerate your velocity, pace, and effectiveness. The curve gets exponentially steeper in terms of complexity and expectations—it’s not linear. But how can you keep improving and growing at that rate? To be successful, you need to take more than just incremental steps. But there’s not really a human equivalent of Moore’s Law.…”³
• NEGATIVE IMPACT ON HEALTH: One of the biggest personal consequences of being stuck in Leader B mode is the toll it can take on our health. I’ve experienced this myself at points in my career when I’ve gained weight, suffered from chronic back and neck pain, and struggled with bouts of bronchitis and asthma from overwork and stress. Clients have shared similar struggles with insomnia, migraines, and other health issues. A recent study suggested that work-related stress over a one-year period in the United Kingdom accounted for 37 percent of all ill-health cases and 45 percent of all working days lost due to illness across all industries and professions. Workload pressure (including tight deadlines and too much responsibility) and lack of managerial support were the main factors employees cited as causing work-related stress.⁴ In the United States, the psychological and physical consequences of burnout come with health-care costs ranging from $125 billion to $190 billion a year—which is to say nothing of the cost that low productivity across organizations, high turnover, and the loss of talent brings.⁵
• NEGATIVE RIPPLE EFFECT ON TEAMS, ORGANIZATIONS, AND LOVED ONES: The costs of Leader B mode don’t stop with us. Like a set of dominoes, your Leader B “ripple effect” cascades out, potentially creating more Leader B days for others. Not only are you not operating at your best, but team spirit, performance, and collaboration can suffer as you telegraph stress or impatience onto teammates and loved ones. Ron Carucci, the author of Rising to Power, poignantly captures this all-too-common dynamic: “Confronted with intense levels of stress amidst turbulent change or the headwinds of a harsh market, leaders’ fuses get short.… Administrative assistants, unwitting family members, or direct reports trying to help can often bear the brunt of misplaced frustrations.”⁶

The Benefits and Rewards of Leader A Mode

If you’re thinking this all sounds pretty grim, you’re right. But the good news vastly outweighs the bad: no matter how long you’ve been in Leader B mode, there is always a way back to living and leading from your highest and best self. Even a taste of Leader A mode is enough to keep many of us in the game because the experience is so rewarding. When we’re consistently in Leader A mode, we have a sense of our purpose and impact, we’re especially effective, and we experience the growth that comes from learning and challenge. Like the dedicated golfer who gets frustrated with the inevitable bad shots along the course, we keep playing for those moments when our swing is perfect and we hear that singular “ping” as the ball sails across the green toward the flag. We can even see that all those frustrating shots were just part of the game—no effort is wasted.

Here’s a glimpse of the benefits of being in Leader A mode:

• IMPACT: There’s nothing like feeling as if you’ve added value, uniquely contributed to your team or organization, or demonstrated your expertise. In Leader A mode, we know our skills and knowledge make a difference.
• RESULTS: There is great satisfaction in meeting our goals, achieving key milestones, or delivering superior results.
• MEANING: Our careers provide tremendous opportunity to engage in meaningful work, enjoy what we do, and feel a sense of achievement. They also provide tremendous opportunity to pay it forward by mentoring someone at an earlier stage of career.
• CONNECTION: Some of life’s deepest connections come from being part of a team working toward a common goal. If you haven’t yet experienced this at work, maybe you have through sports, military service, or involvement with a civic or charitable group. Whatever the context, the feeling of being “in flow” with your colleagues is compelling enough to keep many people in Leader A mode.
• CREATIVITY: Work can provide a context in which we can create something of value that is altogether new. In philosophy, this concept is called Poiesis. Derived from the ancient Greek verb that means “to make,” poiesis is “the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before.”⁷ Whether it’s a product, a service, an idea, or a process, bringing new things to the marketplace is tremendously exciting and keeps our passion ignited.
• GROWTH: Many people I know could have chosen to stay in the same roles they were in five years ago, in jobs where they were fully skilled and perhaps had more free time. But remaining in familiar roles can mean ignoring our drive, ambition, and intellectual curiosity and missing out on the innovation, progress, and expansion that’s part of the Leader A experience. As one leader recently shared with me, he made a job change into a much more intense, fast-paced organization because the new role not only preserved his love for the industry but also offered an exciting, steep learning curve he thrived on.

The Doorway to Leader A: Using the Five Ps

Given the climate of business today—marked by velocity and ferocity—how do we create and sustain the conditions that support Leader A mode, and when we do slip into Leader B mode, how do we get back on track, quickly and with self-compassion?

What I’ve found after working with thousands of ambitious and successful leaders, as well as learning from my own professional experience, is that today’s leadership challenges call for a new approach. When volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity—VUCA, as the military call it—characterize the context in which we’re called upon to lead, we can no longer get by with quick fixes like sharpening our time-management skills or looking for life hacks that increase productivity. Instead, we need a whole-person approach that’s grounded in a continuous level of self-awareness and self-care.

What do I mean by a whole-person approach? At the simplest level, I’m referring to an approach that addresses a leader’s external and internal worlds. Ultimately, effective leadership must attend not only to a leader’s external world of effectiveness—things like results, progress, and output—but also to the leader’s internal world—drivers, motivations, and influences. Any leadership approach that will sustain you over the course of a career as you continue to grow and take on bigger roles requires a deep, honest look inward as well as an outward gaze to remain mindful of your impact.

Over my twenty years of working with leaders, I’ve identified five essential principles that are common to effective leadership in any context, and that are built upon this whole-person approach. They are the key areas that support Leader A mode, get us back on track when Leader B mode takes over, and help us take on increasingly larger roles or opportunities while sustaining our highest and best selves. With the busy leader in mind, I’ve made these principles concrete, practical, and easy to use, and I’ve organized them in a simple yet holistic framework called the five Ps. We’ll explore each one in depth in later chapters, but here’s a brief summary:

The Five Ps

1. PURPOSE: Remain grounded in your passions and contributions. It takes conviction to ensure you are doing your highest and best work and that your work has meaning and is making a difference.
2. PROCESS: Rely on daily practices and routines that honor your natural energy rhythms, enhance performance, save time, help you restore, and provide critical guardrails that keep you on point.
3. PEOPLE: Raise your game by raising the game of others at work and at home. Increase your resilience with healthier boundaries and rules of engagement with others.
4. PRESENCE: Strengthen your inner capacity to pause between stimulus and response, so matters of effectiveness and impact drive decisions and actions, rather than old habits or knee-jerk impulses.
5. PEACE: Learn to trust your capacities to evolve, adapt, and respond to whatever comes your way. Lead from a place of acceptance, gratitude, and trust, rather than a place of stress, striving, and ego protection.

When I use the five Ps, the following image always comes to mind. Purpose sits at the top, as how we define our highest and best guides all our actions. Along the left I picture the next two Ps, people and process, as levers that connect to a leader’s external world. They’re critical to effectiveness and to expanding external capacity, bandwidth, and scale. Along the right side are presence and peace, levers that connect to a leader’s internal world. They’re critical to emotional resilience and satisfaction, and to expanding our inner ability to loosen the grip and trust in who we are and what we’ve accomplished.

Think of each P as a doorway—an entry point to your highest and best self. You can access and examine any of the five Ps at any time. You can align and realign with them as many times a day as you need to. Accessing any of the five Ps will give you a sense of agency and control when things start to feel out of control, because the very moment you hit the pause button and attend to any of the five Ps, you’re already shifting to Leader A mode. And because they work in concert, attending to one P will automatically enrich and align the other four.

I’ve witnessed those who’ve used the five Ps over the long term grow into ever more challenging roles and become sought-after leaders and influential mentors in their fields, while at the same time being more centered, calm, and fulfilled than they’ve ever been. You know these leaders when you encounter them: they’re at the top of their game, leading major organizations or maybe even entire industries, and doing so while remaining centered and inspiring others to do and be their own personal best. Such an outcome is perhaps the pinnacle of leadership.

These leaders bring to mind a concept from the ancient Chinese belief system Taoism called wu-wei, which can be translated as “actionless action.” You can also think of it as effortless action, or if you prefer, being “in the zone.” Wu-wei is about living in a state of alignment or harmony, with others as well as within ourselves, and from a leadership standpoint, it is one of the most rewarding outcomes of the long-term practice of leading from a Leader A mindset. As its paradoxical nature suggests, when Leader A is your operating norm, your efforts become more effortless, the value you provide is invaluable, and though you’re probably busier than ever, you enjoy a greater sense of fulfillment and ease. When something does go amiss, as it inevitably will, you respond with more equanimity and poise. You realize and accept that Leader A and Leader B modes are all part of the whole leadership journey. You don’t panic when you find yourself in Leader B mode because, as with any long road with peaks and valleys, you trust you’re still heading in the right direction.

What’s in This Book—and How to Use It

My first book, Own the Room: Discover Your Signature Voice to Master Your Leadership Presence, written with my colleague and good friend Muriel Maignan Wilkins, was about helping leaders build their leadership presence by making a more authentic connection to others. The Leader You Want to Be looks at how to tap into and expand a powerful inner and outer capacity for leadership by making a more authentic connection to yourself.

This book is built on three foundational tenets: self-care, self-awareness, and personal agency. Taking care of yourself is a prerequisite for the Leader A experience. One CEO I worked with put it beautifully: “Self-care is hardly some selfish thing,” he said. “Care of oneself should be part of the mandate for every job.” I couldn’t agree more. Effective leadership requires an understanding of the conditions that cultivate our highest and best contributions and our deepest and most inspiring passions. In short, proper self-care enables us to do and be our best. It’s not something we can squeeze in at the end of a long day or put off until we can get around to it. On the contrary, it’s an urgent daily responsibility whose importance can no longer be overlooked or underestimated. Throughout the book, I’ll show you some new ways to integrate self-care into the workday and into your routine.

Self-awareness is just as necessary. So many of us are so busy that we barely stop to check in with ourselves or look at a situation from a more objective, thoughtful viewpoint. But using the five Ps requires you to use what many call the “inner spectator,” which is the part of yourself that can see your behavior, thoughts, and actions from a calm, objective point of view, even in the midst of the busiest of schedules. In varying contexts this inner spectator has also been called the observer self, the impartial observer, the ever-present self, the inner witness, and, one of my favorites, “the one inside who is not busy.”⁸ Yes, even the busiest of us has a “spectating self” that resides within, a self that is protected from the fray and is always calm, always centered. I’m most drawn to the way LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who has a 97 percent employee approval rating and is widely regarded as one of the most beloved CEOs in the world, describes it.⁹ In an interview with Oprah Winfrey on her SuperSoul Sunday show, Weiner explained that the ability to be a “spectator to your own thoughts, especially when you become emotional,” is one of the most important lessons he’s learned and one of the keys to happiness.¹⁰ I’m particularly drawn to his use of “spectator” because it conjures the image of periodically coming off the playing field where the drama of the day-to-day game is happening so we can see ourselves in action, even as the action is unfolding.

The inner spectator will function as our tour guide through the five Ps, and throughout the book we’ll be learning how to flex the muscle of self-spectating. The fact is, most leaders already have within them what they need to lead like Leader A. The five Ps provide a way to tap into what’s already there—and to remind us to look within, which can be easy to forget when we’re exhausted, overwhelmed, or already on the slippery slope to burnout. I’ll show you how to access your inner spectator and then how to cultivate it, building and strengthening it like a muscle, so you can come to rely on it to support and sustain Leader A.

And finally, there’s personal agency, or the power we have to make a choice. When we’re in Leader B mode, it may feel like we’ve run out of options. But with a Leader A lens, we can see avenues and options that were there all along but simply hidden when we’re overextended, when we’re not getting the self-care we need, or when one of the Ps needs a tune-up. Over time, habitually attending to the five Ps enables us to live into the truth that we always have a choice in how we show up every day—in every meeting, through every email, and at every moment. The five Ps help us see our personal agency and increase the chances that we spend more of our time in Leader A mode.

While the advice you’ll read here is culled from my years of working with leaders as an executive coach, strategic planner, and management consultant, you’ll also find ideas and tools drawn from my background and certifications in yoga, my experience with meditation, and my personal experience as a first-generation child of Asian immigrants. Though I was born and raised in the United States, from my earliest memory a thread of Eastern culture and philosophy has run through my life, and I’m pleased to see the growing interest in Eastern practices in the broader world, in everything from health and wellness to management and leadership.

So you may see a concept presented through the lens of a university professor’s research or, as you’ve seen already, through the words of Lao Tzu, the father of Taoism—sometimes even in the same paragraph! Whatever their source, all the tools I present are meant to be tactical, no-nonsense, and ready-to-implement. And, where it’s applicable, I draw on the lessons I am still learning as a leader trying to make a difference and hold it all together each day. I’m the first to admit I don’t have it all figured out; this book is as much the result of my own daily struggle to manage the tensions of contemporary leadership as it is my mission to help others lead with more consciousness, ability, and ease. But here you’ll find the best of what I’ve learned about how to create your own personal playbook for being Leader A, and you’ll find many real-life stories of leaders who’ve used the five Ps to get an accurate read on their situations and then quickly align to the vision and goals they have for their organizations, their teams, and themselves.

You’ll also find an abundance of frameworks, tools, tips, ideas, and exercises in every chapter. Thus, I’d recommend reading the book over multiple sittings, and over time experimenting to see what supports your personal best and Leader A. You may not even want to read the five Ps in the order they’re presented. If you know immediately, for instance, that your processes are keeping you in Leader B mode, start with chapter 3. Or if you’re aware that you have a tendency to be hard on yourself and what you need is more inner peace, you can skip ahead to chapter 6. Wherever you begin, you can always return to the other Ps later. Though each P is explained separately, as we proceed you’ll come to see how they all work together, influencing and informing each other.

Chapter 1 will begin by taking a closer look at the day-to-day realities and challenges of being an ambitious, successful leader in today’s fast-paced, intense, and complex workplace. We will see how these challenges lead us into common coping mechanisms and predictable “pitfalls of doing” that increase our stress, ineffectiveness, and dissatisfaction. We’ll also see how it’s possible, by using a Leader A lens, to transform those very pitfalls into performance enhancers.

Chapter 2 introduces the first P, purpose, and discusses how getting anchored in your purpose at work can lift you out of Leader B mode. We’ll look at how purpose evolves and manifests differently over time, and I’ll give you a concrete, practical tool that will guide you in how to gain clarity on your highest and best use. Chapter 2 will also show you how getting grounded in your purpose creates a way to sift your yesses and nos to prioritize your workload and ensure you are leading with passion and contribution.

In chapters 3 and 4, we’ll look at two Ps—process and people—that impact the leader’s outer world of effectiveness, discipline, and sustainability. In chapter 3, we will look at how you can create processes that fit you and your context, protect your time, and restore your energy. In chapter 4, we’ll take a look at the strength of your team and your strategic network of support, and we’ll explore how to set healthy boundaries.

In chapters 5 and 6, we’ll turn our attention to two Ps—presence and peace—that focus on the leader’s inner world. In chapter 5, we’ll discuss how you can be more present even when distraction, procrastination, or self-sabotage threaten to get the best of you. This chapter will also show you how to cultivate your self-awareness so your actions come less from a state of reaction and more from a place of thoughtful, considered reasoning. In chapter 6, you will learn more about how to let go so you’re less focused on striving and protecting your ego and more able to access acceptance, contentment, and trust. The present and peaceful leader is able to operate from an inner place of calm, equanimity, and confidence, no matter the situation at hand.

With all the Ps in place, chapter 7 will discuss how you can pay it forward and use the five Ps to develop other Leader A leaders, teams, and organizations. While ambitious leaders will always be evolving and developing individually, the ultimate in leadership is mentoring others and helping our teams and organizations sustain, scale, and thrive.

Finally, the appendixes at the end of the book will provide you with tools that will help you see “where you’re at” and get a quick read on the best response to whatever leadership challenge you’re facing.

My hope is that you’ll read this book as if we’re in a coaching session together. Throughout the book I’ll lay out for you the same concepts, leadership tools, and exercises my clients have successfully used to grow into the leaders they want to be. My aim is to honor your whole person while appreciating the unique organizational context and world within which you operate. I hope you’ll feel free to experiment and see which tools work best for you and your particular leadership role.

Today’s leadership challenges are formidable, but if you are attending to your highest and best self—the outer forces of your roles and responsibilities, as well as the inner drives and passions that fuel your desire to lead—challenges become opportunities. Leadership presents at every moment an unparalleled possibility to learn, innovate, grow, mentor, and make a significant difference in the world. It presents at every moment the opportunity to discover your highest and best self, to become more deeply aware of yourself as well as the world around you, to hold a broad, capacious perspective, and to fulfill a purpose the world needs that is wholly, uniquely yours to give.