Lead with care, not fear

- [Interviewer] You got a lot of good stuff in your book, Unstoppable Teams, could you share, you know what, what'd you say is sort of the key thesis or big idea or main message here? - [Alden Mills] The biggest thesis out of all of this is using the most fundamental human emotion to connect, inspire, and empower people to do something that moves them from a point of natural selfishness to selflessness. And that human emotion is care. It's not fear. You don't want to lead by fear, what you want to lead by is with care and what I call care based leading. - Okay. So, you say care is the emotion, and so we're going to unpack that into, you got a bit of a framework here, but can you, let, let's talk a little bit about the emotion itself and how that does lead folks out of selfishness to selflessness? - So take a look at some of the most recent research that's come out. There's wonderful piece of research, that's come out through a psychologist down in UCLA who, I've quoted her in my book, and what she's talking about and discovered is, we have, all humans, have a natural capacity for care reciprocity. Unless you're a psychopath, okay? The amagula isn't firing and we just don't accept any emotion there. But for the 99.9% of us out there, we respond to care. In its most basic form: I hold the door for you. You turn around and you hold the door for somebody else. Right? That's usually pretty instinctually a reciprocal event. The same type of reciprocity occurs as you go further and deeper into caring for somebody. Hey, how are you doing today Pete? What happened last night? I heard about your mom, is she okay? You know, going and taking a step in initiating care. All of a sudden Pete feels like, wow that somebody did something kind of selfless. They weren't worried about themselves, they're worried about me and my mom. And they were actually, they showed an element of curiosity and care about me, that may have nothing to do with work, but it does have to do with the whole picture of who Pete is. You go even further from that and say, now I'm a first line, second line leader, manager, wherever you are in your organization, And you start saying, Hey, I know you are today but I also know that you want to be, here, in a year. I'm going to help you get there. Again, it's not directly related to trying to help you get a better return on investment. It's trying to help somebody go to another level. And when starts to happen, people will start to say, Hey, wait a second. These people, these people are actually more interested in me, and I'm going to reciprocate by doing even better work. And that's at the highest level, what I'm talking about.