Alain Hunkins - Cracking the Leadership Code

The goal of this book is to shorten your leadership learning curve and accelerate your leadership growth. Its content is drawn from two decades of fieldwork. I've had the good fortune of getting to work with and learn from a tremendous number of leaders and teachers, and this book represents a distillation of that knowledge. My hope is that the insights and tools I offer in this book will help you reap the rewards that exceptional leadership brings.

In this book, I won't stick to the flat, two-dimensional world of leadership theory. I'll share what works and what doesn't work. At times, it's going to get messy and ugly. Above all, it's going to be real. Because leadership—authentic, conscious leadership—is hard work. But it's a journey that's worth the effort.

You'll read stories and learn concepts that are straightforward and practical. You'll have an opportunity to look in the mirror, take stock of your current skillset, and improve on it. You'll gain tools that you can apply immediately in your work for tangible results. These tools will enable you to accomplish the following:

Improve employee engagement

Increase productivity

Decrease levels of employee turnover

Expand influence

Decrease stress

Improve overall work-life satisfaction

Cracking the Leadership Codeis divided into four sections. Part Iprovides context for the challenges faced by today's leaders. In Chapter 1, you'll be introduced to the framework of the master keys: connection, communication, and collaboration. Chapter 2shares a brief history of organizational leadership, and explains how you've unknowingly inherited the bad habits of previous generations of leaders. Chapter 3discusses the cultural and societal forces that caused that Old-School leadership to stop working, and why leaders are struggling to keep up with the speed of changing times.

In Part II, you will learn how to decrypt the first of the essential leadership principles: connection. Chapter 4discusses empathy, and explains why improving this soft skill can deliver huge business benefits. Chapter 5details the daily challenges leaders face in practicing empathy and how to overcome them. Chapter 6unscrambles the concept of leadership credibility—what it is, why it's important, and how you can build it.

Part IIItakes aim at one of the most challenging parts of leadership: communication. Chapter 7untangles the confusing conundrum of communication. Chapter 8cracks the communication code, giving you six keys to improve your communication immediately.

Part IVdives deep into the third essential leadership principle: collaboration. Chapter 9clarifies motivation—what it is, what it isn't, and the common traps that leaders fall into when trying to motivate others. Chapter 10offers a new model for motivational leadership: being a motivational choice architect. It shares the two primary needs all people have: safety and energy. Chapter 11describes the two essential needs that need to be met to enable high performance: purpose and ownership. Chapter 12explains the employee experience and how you can influence it to improve teamwork and collaboration. Chapter 13addresses the question no one wants to ask: how can I implement these great ideas when I'm already too busy? This chapter shares tools, tips, and techniques on how to make things simpler. At the end of each chapter is a resources section that distills the big ideas. You can use this to begin crafting your own personal leadership development plan.

Since the new millennium, I've worked with thousands of teams, and tens of thousands of leaders in 25 countries around the world. I've coached people from frontline employees to C-Suite executives to titans of Wall Street to dog food factory workers. I've worked with teams as small as two and have led workshops for more than 2,000 participants. I've worked with every industry you can think of, as well as some industries you probably don't know exist.

In my role, I've been given an all-access pass to hundreds of companies. While working behind the scenes, I'd get confidential briefings on a team or the company's most pressing business issues. I'd meet with key players, who'd confess their deepest dysfunctions and admit what was broken and needed fixing.

After gathering all that data, I'd search for clues, on the hunt to truly understand these people and teams. I fervently wanted to find out what made them tick, because I wanted to help them to tick better. Then, I'd go back and work with the individuals, teams, and/or whole companies.

On the surface, each team's and company's situation and issues were unique. However, as I began to work with more and more clients, I started to see that they weren't so unusual after all. Because each company had people, the key to improving their performance ultimately came back to the same set of root causes: some dimension of leadership. My task was to figure out which dimension and how to help them apply it in their work environment.

My entire life, I've been gripped by the question, “Why do people do what they do?” No matter how challenging or stressful the situation, I've always wanted to make sense of it. The need to make sense of stress goes way back for me. It started in my early childhood.

To preface this, my family loved me and fed me and housed me and did the best they could. However, I grew up in an apartment filled with screaming, stressful, dysfunctional leaders—that is, the adults. Even as a kid, I knew there had to be a better way. I could see the difference when I went to visit my friends. My friends' families would talk and listen to each other. They'd do stuff as a family together. Why couldn't my family be more like them? Why couldn't my mother and grandmother lead us more effectively?

Much of the time, my home life was like a toxic work environment. There was either yelling or a complete lack of communication. As a young child, I strived to please my mother and grandmother, thinking that if I did whatever they asked, then they'd be appeased and things would get better. As I got older, I realized that no matter how well I followed their instructions, my behavior didn't change their behavior. When I was the “good employee,” I still got the toxic treatment. Eventually, I checked out. I mentally and emotionally detached.

That primary stressful setting affected me greatly. I became highly attuned to other people's emotions and behaviors. I studied psychology and theater—disciplines that focus on human behavior and motivation. I learned about group dynamics and facilitation skills. And although I couldn't use all those skills to help my first “workplace,” I've been putting them to good use ever since.

What I've learned is that if you dig deep enough, there's always a story behind the dysfunction. If you can find a way to bring that story out of the shadow and into the light, there's the potential to change things. You can be freed up to lead with a story and not be stuck leading from the story.

In my case, I didn't really understand what was going on with my mother and grandmother until I was an adult. They'd hidden their stories from me when I was a child—maybe in an attempt to protect me. But their stories influenced our every interaction nonetheless.

I learned that my mother and grandmother were both Holocaust survivors. They had their lives torn apart by the horrors of war. Their crime? Being Jewish and living in Nazi-occupied Belgium during World War II.

My grandmother gave my mother away to the Belgian underground resistance to hide her as best they could. At the age of seven years old, my mother had her hair dyed blond and was given a false identity and address to memorize in case of capture. She was moved from orphanages to foster homes to convents to barns every few months. This went on for three years.