Hello, everyone! This is Tonya Dawn Recla, your Super Power Expert and today I’m delighted to have with us a really fantastic guest. He brings a wealth of information with a successful author, speaker and trusted authority in the field of leadership and so I really want you to kind of settle in and listen in as we have a dialogue around leadership but he brings a unique aspect to it, so he looks really phenomenal on paper, so for over 20 years he served as the president of International Nonprofit World. He’s now the president of HD leaders and so these are global entities that have an impact and he’s an author of the best-selling book, The Top 10 Mistakes Leaders Make, and his newest book is, Top 10 Ways to be a Great Leader, so we’re going to talk to him today about leadership and personal development superpowers so please join me in welcoming, Dr. Hans Finzel on the show welcome, Hans.
Thank you Tonya! Great to be on the show with you today!
I’m so excited to have you here! You know, I haven’t known you long but you’re certainly delightful and I’m really excited to share your expertise and experience with our audience. Thank you for joining us.
You are so welcome! We’re going to have fun!
Always have fun! So first for us talking about fun, we’re going to throw you right in there and ask, what are your superpowers?
I have great discernment for emotional intelligence.
Well I’m a person who has a great discernment for people’s emotional intelligence. You know we’ve talked in the past a lot about IQ but EQ is emotional intelligence, it’s a lot more important for success in life and leadership and I have the ability to size up people’s emotional intelligence pretty quickly.
Oh I like that, so talk to me about that, what does that look like?
Well emotional intelligence is your people skills how long you get and how much in touch you are when how you come across to other people. And if you’re self-aware a lot of bosses are jerks because they’re not self-aware and they have blind spots so your emotional intelligence what I call, the soft side of success in life. It’s my people skills, my conflict resolution skills, how do I come across to other people, how do they make me or how do I make people feel when I’m in the room with them when I am under great pressure, Can I handle myself well? All that’s emotional intelligence. And it’s so critical to success in any field.
I love that! Yeah I’m really familiar with Emotional intelligence, I love how you worded it that you can size it up pretty rapidly. That to me is a phenomenal superpower. So do you have any tips for people on just maybe some things that they can be looking for if they’re trying to get a feel for how emotionally intelligent someone is?
Yeah well, I think it has to do with how comfortable do you feel around them. How did they make you feel? Do they make you feel anxious, uncomfortable? Would you like to hang out at Starbucks with them and the more people put you at ease, I think the more emotional intelligence they are and a big part of that is, it’s not just about them. They’re not just focusing on themselves but they’re focusing on the other people in the room. So that’s some of the ways you can assess a person’s emotional intelligence, how do I feel around them, Am I empowered, do I enjoy being around them, do they fuel me or am I ready for this meeting to be over.
I feel like backing out I’m going to go. I love it! Well and it’s so funny my husband and I met teaching at the Counterintelligence Special Agent Course for the government, and one of the topics that everybody always wants is to teach a lie detection, right, that’s the big sexy whatnot. And after a while of doing an LP and all these other modalities and stuff like that, what I found was similar to what you’re talking about and I started moving the dialogue into what I called congruity. And so teaching people about the congruence of our communications stuff on your mind you know, your mind says one thing, your body says something else and then your energy says something totally different and when those three things aligned you feel congruent essentially what you’re talking about people feel good around you like you’d feel confident, you’d feel secure, but when they’re off it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re lying it simply means that there is an incongruity somewhere in there. I hadn’t heard it described the same way you just described it with regard to emotional intelligence but it makes perfect sense to me that those are connected.
It’s a big field and I love it. And when I think about the people I’ve hired and fired a lot of people in my career and the people I fired, it was always because of their poor EQ, not because they weren’t smart and couldn’t do their job but I remember one lady had to let go and people would say you know I just feel like I’m walking on eggshells around her. I never know when she’s going to explode, well that’s and sadly she wouldn’t accept help, she wouldn’t get help, she didn’t change and so it was an EQ, if you can picture an iceberg everything above the water line is IQ and that’s what we see first how smart people are you know, what they can do but the under the water line is a lot bigger and that’s emotional intelligence and what sank the Titanic under the water line.
That’s really perfect, and it’s such a great description in it. Like I said the parallels are so great. I just picked up the revised copy of Psycho Cybernetics and I was thinking about his whole philosophy on self-image, and it reminded me and I’d forgotten this but when I was much younger I would say probably a junior high maybe high school, I came up with a theory that most of the social ills in the world would be resolved if not all of them if we looked at self-esteem. And so, it’s so funny because what you’re talking about there just remind me of that when you’re you are competent and comfortable of who you are, you can be generous and gregarious and benevolent with the people that you’re around. And it doesn’t cost you anything with regard to your own identity. And that’s a theory that I love delving into, so you’re 100% speaking my language here.
Oh good, that’s awesome!
So let’s talk about how you got into this field, so I know that like I said, you look amazing on paper, you’re very impressive between the bestseller, the experience and everything else, but where did this all begin? Why leadership?
When I was a young guy starting out in my career after grad school in my 30s, I ended up working for a visionary founder who was a jerk. And he crushed my dreams and when I speak nowadays and I do a lot of public speaking on leadership and I always ask my audiences, how many do you work for a terrible boss? Guess how many people raise their hand?
Every single goes up.
I want to be a person who empowers other people.
Yeah and so I worked for a terrible boss and he was very smart and I believed in the vision but, he was a control freak and a micromanager he had a Founders syndrome and I ended up quitting that, cause which I was very excited about and that’s when I got interested in leadership and I said to myself, if I ever become a leader of something significant, I don’t want to be that kind of person. I want to be the kind of person that actually empowers people doesn’t frustrate them. So that’s how I first got my interest in leadership.
Oh that’s a great way, in fact it’s in alignment with one of the things we talk about a lot here, Super Power Experts that you know, are super powers really almost always start off as challenges and that you’re kind of speaking to that with regard to like having that experience is what made you this amazing authority on this matter because it motivated you to really see beyond what you experienced and not only that but it allows you back to that emotional intelligence piece, that allows you to connect with people who’ve had similar experiences.
Exactly.
And so looking back like does that feel like you kind of designed it that way. Like, what is your take on faith and divine intervention and design and all that other stuff?
No, I did not design it that way. You know when people ask me those questions sometimes, what did you want to be when you were a kid when you grow up? And I like, that’s zero and I had no idea I never thought about it. I just had fun growing up as a kid and the teenager even when I went away to college, I didn’t really have an intention of a big dream. And so I fell into the field of leadership out of need and that’s what often creates the greatest careers when you’re trying to meet a need, right. And so I just, as the years gone by I started studying leadership, I have my doctorate in the field, I started writing on it and then I became a CEO of a big $35 billion international nonprofit which I ran for 20 years, so I really got to bust my chops practicing what I was learning. I wouldn’t say I’m a perfect leader or even a great leader but I’ve made so many mistakes. And so you know I’m more and more became passionate about helping good leaders become great leaders and especially helping leaders that just start out kind of know what to pay attention to.
OK
So there wasn’t a plan I just fell into it.
Yes I like that! So what’s one of the biggest mistakes you made as a leader?
Probably in my book, The Top 10 Mistakes Leaders Make, the first chapter is the top down attitude and that’s where you know I’m the boss, I’m the most important. I think the biggest mistake I made early in my career, I was arrogant, I was self-centered. It was all about me and my career I was a Type-A personality that would walk over other people, run over people to accomplish my goals. And my, you know what I wanted to accomplish and I had a great crisis in my 30s were my team rose up against me and they sort of voted me off the island so to speak, and they said we don’t want you to lead us anymore, we don’t like your leadership it’s not because you’re not smart, you’re very smart and very gifted and you do a lot of things well and I said, “Well what’s the problem?” They said, “You don’t care about us, it’s all about you, Hans, it’s not about us”. And so, that was a huge learning that I had early in my career and I think I’ve had to really learn that. But great leadership is about “We” it’s not about “Me”. And that was a big lesson I learned.
How did you handle that?
It was hard, it was very hard, and I was crushed. And that’s when I went away and did my doctorate in a few of the leadership and I had this wonderful mentor and he said, “Hans, when people criticize you know, don’t get defensive, keep your mouth shut, process what they’re saying and look for the 5 percent truth in what they’re telling you”. This goes back to emotional intelligence and EQ because a lot of people and I had a blind spot a big blind spot about me and they were right, actually their criticism it wasn’t 5 percent it was probably 25 percent or more. So I learned, I learned how I was coming across and whether no matter where they were right or wrong I said, “This is how I’m coming across and I need to make some changes”. That’s becoming more in touch with your emotional intelligence and how you coming across the people.
I’m laughing because I was you know, as a counterintelligence agent, I used to do surveillance and surveillance is very much a team sport at least in the team that I was on, that’s how they handled it. And we had these sessions after every day called, The Hot wash and that’s where I mean the team the synchronous, the synchronicity of the team was so crucial that if there’s anything outstanding or any issues or anything like that between members it had to be hashed through before the next day. And so we had these hot washes and every time I mean not every time but me being dramatic, but every time there was this in particular gentleman who got upset because of something that I said and he ended up crying and I was like, I just don’t get, the chief who was male at the time pulled me aside and he’s like look, like a have the same issue you do but you’re female so everybody is going to think you’re a bitch you know, and I’m like, “Well I don’t understand what’s happening here, like I didn’t intentionally mean to hurt his feelings you know”. And he’s like, “I know, but you got to watch how you’re speaking” like should I giggle like? Of course I was being defensive and being like I don’t get it, like what’s the problem here, why is he taking it this way. And it took me a few years to really settle in and that’s what drove me to you know in my way speaking over in the superpower arena, more looking at where somebody is energy sitting when they’re communicating and they solidly sitting in the center of who they are or if they’re up in their head and that kind of defensive posturing and reacting and attuning myself to how to say the exact same message but from a different frequency so it’s received differently.
Yes
And it was you know, that was the bulk of my early career was that kind of feedback and I finally was like OK like I’m the common denominator here like that thinking that there’s a message in there somewhere for me. But like you said it stung though, like it kind of sucked to get that feedback.
Unity on a team is built through healthy conflict.
And you know it’s a lifelong thing and you know naturally we are abrasive to certain people just by virtue of our personality, it sounds like no matter what you did you were abrasive to that particular person, but I love what you guys were doing was so healthy a hot wash. I’ve never heard that before but I wish more teams would do hot washes because you know one of the biggest problems in teams is lack of trust. And the reasons they don’t trust each other is because they’re are not vulnerable and they avoid conflict, right. And in unity on a team is built through healthy conflict. So that’s what your chief was making you do every evening. I love that! I wish more teams would do that.
Oh I really do, I think we should go full on fight club, honestly.
Yes
I think every athlete should have like a boxing ring and you just kind of put that because I think to as women as young girls, very few of us are, I mean I don’t want to make overgeneralizations but at least that was my experience growing up as younger like there weren’t a lot of dialogs around healthy expressions of anger and expression socially you know you just do. And I watched because I was the type of girl that tended to have a lot of male friends and I watched how they would argue and fight and then be best friends, just like on a turn of a dime and it was like an archaeologist or an anthropologist, I like observing their behavior like you know, like an alien dropped on this planet looking at these guys going where you’re just like we’re at each other’s throats and then now you’re fine, whereas the passive aggressive methodology of kind of quieting down and not bringing it to the surface, I saw how toxic that was in all relationships. And so it was interesting that you know I can look back on my existence and see all these examples of these things that played out that way. You know, you and I can sit here and have a conversation about it now, so pretty fantastic.
Yes, that’s correct, thank you.
So we’re going to take a quick break. You’ve been listening to Dr. Hans Finzel about leadership and personal development superpowers, so when we come back from this break we’re only going to pick his brain about some of the sallying arenas around leadership and what you can do to tap into those so stick with us and we’ll be right back. Awesome! We’re back with the Super power up podcast, humorlessly with Dr. Hans Finzel about leadership and personal development superpowers so, what’s on the horizon in the leadership arenas and how can people kind of get ahead of the curve and be the next best greatest leader?
Well one thing I’ve observed is, when people get into leadership they don’t realize it needs some training and so I think it’s almost like there’s so many great books and podcasts on leadership and seminars, books but you know I think my first message to people in fact my new book, “The Top 10 ways to be a Great Leader”, is sort about the essential skills that leaders need to master in the “L” in leadership is to me that represents the two most important words in the leader’s vocabulary. The “L” stands for, “Listen and Learn”, so my first message on the horizon for any of you who are new into leadership or maybe you’ve been a leader a long time is to keep learning about how to be a better leader. And there’s many ways you can learn but you know if you’re a doctor or a teacher or an airline pilot, you have to keep refreshing your skill. But we have no requirements like that for people in leadership.
No, we don’t.
It’s a sacred responsibility to be a leader.
People fall into leadership and they think, “Well I guess, I know I can wing this” so my message is, no don’t wing it, learn, study, develop. It’s a sacred responsibility to lead other people and I think you know I told you at the beginning I think before we actually went on the air, I think I’ve seen more bad leaders and some good leaders and so don’t just assume you know what you’re doing. I’m just passionately wanted to help leaders listen and learn. When I ask the audience a question, OK you said your boss is a jerk, why? And so many times I hear this, “He just won’t listen”, “She just won’t listen”. I”. And if they don’t listen they don’t learn because those two words are totally intertwined. You can’t learn if you don’t listen and people love working for bosses and managers and leaders that are open to feedback, to input, right, to creativity because they you know, it’s like a team and the boss doesn’t know everything, sadly some bosses think they do.
I love that! Yeah, I experienced first-hand being in the military and then in the government and how promotion worked there. And it was kind of like who’s breathing the longest, you know that kind of saying and there wasn’t a lot of tram in the way it was broken down was there’s a lot of training in the skill set but not necessarily in the management of people. And I saw my face was a little different because I went in later in life and had a master’s degree and kind of dive, had been diving around in the psyches of people for quite a while and so that was something that I noticed was severely lacking. And it made a big difference and like you it’s like in observing the world around me like you know, you can see the leaders you people love to follow and the leaders who people are very resistant to following and the pattern seem to be very obvious. But for some reason when it comes to our own personal behavior we have blind spots and I think that it goes back to what you’re talking about be willing to be led, be willing to learn, keep training and there’s always somebody who’s got a skill set that you don’t currently possess.
Absolutely! And so the best leader knows that and I always hired to my weaknesses and some people are threatened by strong leaders around them but I think it’s the best kind of team.
It’s all Henry Ford philosophy, right.
Yes, exactly.
You don’t have to be the smartest guy in the room, you just have to know who those people are.
Totally, absolutely and let me just say leadership is people work. It’s not your technical expertise; it’s not how smart you are its people work. And I think in the government in the military it is a big problem it’s also a big problem in the educational world and in public education in America. I’ve been I’ve worked with some school systems. Oh my goodness. It’s a lot like military. You just scratch your head at who ended up being the superintendent or the principal.
Well, let’s talk a little bit about you know, Super Power Expert’s a big part of our dialogue is around fear, because my bias is that you know when fear drives us in decision making that’s when we tend to make decisions at lower frequencies or you know lower emotional IQ and emotional intelligence and so there’s a real deep seated fear I think in people. Well let me back up a second my thoughts just took another turn. So the imagery that I’m seeing is like you know we talk about mastering your personal power which is kind of that individual Hero’s Journey, right, like walking up the mountain and everything else and then once you kind of get to a certain state of awareness of self-actualization if you will, you know the super power conversation for us is when you then move to working in collaboration and working with others and being open to being fed and led. And while feeding and leading and on all that good stuff. And so, but what we find is that a big part of the obstacle or the biggest obstacle for people transitioning from kind of looking at it as their own personal growth versus really what am I doing in the world. Is fear, right? And so as you mentioned that you said that you know a lot of people are resistant to kind of letting other people around them if they you know they might feel on them, what’s the word? You said it.
I’m not sure which word.
Insecure, feeling threatened, there you go, and I knew it was right there. Let’s talk a little bit about that fear and how can we like what practical advice can you offer to people about that, how to be more open to allowing other people’s brilliance to shine because that seems like an electric like if like a bottle of that that’s probably like a million dollar you know solution there.
Yes, and I’m a huge fan of Brene Brown and I think I’m sure you know Brene in her own power of vulnerability. But if I have a magic sauce that could help people overcome fear I would be very wealthy.
I’m telling you, yeah.
Because fear is something that everybody deals with and has to overcome and that’s the conversation going on between your ears. But in leadership for example, delegation is such a huge thing. The “H” leadership stands for “Hands off for delegation”, and one of the big problems that leaders have is they don’t delegate well in a lot of it is around fear. They’re afraid the job won’t be done well, they’re afraid it won’t be done on time, they’re also afraid it might be done better and they’re just control freaks they’re afraid of letting go and letting other people shine. And I think the worst kind of leader is the kind of leader that has just as the control freak, who has to control everything and make all the decisions, they can never go on vacation because the place falls apart without them because they’re control freaks. And to me it’s all embedded in fear. If you could just relax and trust other people back to trust you have to. To me great delegation is mentoring other people. It’s developing the leaders around you and one of the biggest responsibilities of leadership in my mind is to develop other leaders around you and work yourself out of the job. And if everything runs great without you consider yourself a great leader. You’re still needed to be because you’re the founder you’re, the owner, you’re the boss and you have to shift from just trying to control everything to being a team leader who helps the team.
And sometimes that means allowing other people to fall.
Oh yes.
You know you make mistakes and to learn resiliency in and of themselves. I think a lot of times people claim that because they exceeded their ego. You know that’s obviously placed in fear should think that they’re there that need it though is not required. And so there’s a lot of beauty it’s like parenting, you know there’s different ways of parenting. And one of the methodologies is, allowing your child to be this kind of holistic whole version of themselves and not be codependent upon you but that threatens a personality that might want to live vicariously through that. And I think that we that we see that in leadership a lot.
Yeah, you know a lot of help. Let me tell you a funny story. I was my wife and I go to Mexico a lot for a vacation and we were in Cabo and in a hot tub at our resort and there was this lady in there and we were just talking in general older lady and she pointed her husband over there on the couch on his phone at the pool working and she said you know my husband hasn’t taken a vacation for 25 years and the only reason he’s an attorney and the only reason he’s here is because he won a free trip and he felt like he had to take it. And he’s sitting there by the pool working his phone. And I just thought how sad that you can’t learn to relax and let go and have a more full balanced life because I don’t think we’re meant to work 24/7, do you?
Not at all, but I do think that you’re touching on something that’s really crucial and it’s you know we see it a lot with entrepreneurs and with businesses that we buy. It’s like this hamster wheel and in you know a little clip on our end like we just recently came back from burning man, so my husband and daughter and I we all had a burning man and it was interesting because we did exactly what you were talking about you know, prior to that the idea of taking like eight days away total you know no digital products, no technology, whatsoever from both businesses that we operate was unheard of. And it finally just got to the point where we’re like we’re just going to do it. And what’s worse that can happen, like I think the world is going to continue to spend like I think it’ll be OK. And it was such an amazing reset to have that experience and not that we didn’t take time out I mean we travel we do a lot of other things but there was always a connectivity aspect. We always had our you know we could get to it and we had put teams in place and done this other thing and it was time to really test it and see OK can this survive without us. And it was so liberating, so incredibly liberating. But I’ll tell you on the other side of that it felt like this giant chasm that we were going to leap over and then as soon as it was done I was like, oh that was such a nonevent like it was super easy I think now we’re a little addicted to the idea of making it more often.
We’re definitely to smartphones, no question about it; it’s become a huge social problem. And when we go to Mexico on vacation we lock our phones and generally in the safe, in the room and try to you know we’ll check them once a day in case there’s some emergency but it’s harder and harder to let that device go, isn’t it?
Relax and trust other people.
But it’s so powerful when you try and address that, and I think that’s what you’re speaking to is you know that the folks, when you get nothing else out of this entire interview which if that’s true you probably weren’t listening, but the point about relax and trust other people is so huge and just watch what happens and true in your families, it’s true with your children, it’s true your spouses, with business, with across the board just relax and trust other people and watch what happens. And I think you’re going to find that it that opens up this expansive world far greater than anything you can anticipate. Hans, where can people go to find out more about you?
My web site is, hansfinzel.com and all my books are on Amazon and wherever books are sold you just type in my name and you’ll see my books. And right now I’ve just launched my 10th book, The Top 10 Ways to be a Great Leader, I’m very excited about it and so thanks for having me on the show.
Oh absolutely! We’ll make sure to put links to your book there and I’m excited about you and all the work that you’re doing in the world so thank you for representing the push for higher emotional intelligence and leadership, I really appreciate that.
Thank you Tonya, I appreciate it too.
Absolutely, so you’ve been listening to Super Power up podcast and we’ve been talking about leadership and personal development superpowers. So thank you all for tuning in. As always we appreciate your loyalty and until next time go out, uncover your superpowers and change the world. Take care everyone.
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