I gained a new monthly retainer client last week. The problem to solve is my sweet spot: Scale. Classic Rule of 3 and 10 problem; the business is growing and operations need to adjust.
My goal (OKR) is to gain 10 new clients, starting in March when I left Atlassian, and the end of the year. This latest client brings me to five. Just two more for a “green” OKR.
As clients grow, so does revenue; October will be a new record month.
I’m still a long way from my bigger goals, and new clients don’t come easy, but I feel like this ship is pointed in the right direction. Making progress! 🚣♂️
How are you doing on your 2025 health and fitness goals?
As expected, I’ve gained weight on my calorie surplus. About 10 lbs. However, I’ve also gained 15 lbs on my squat max, so at least some of that 10 lbs is muscle! I still need to do my next DEXA scan to quantify and see exactly what’s changed. Ideally I’m building muscle, and later I'll cut body fat. It’s harder in your 40s, but not impossible!
Interestingly, I’ve also been able to increase my VO2Max, despite getting heavier. It’s up to 47 as reported on my Garmin, on a goal of 48.
The only goal for me that remains elusive is HRV. I was crushing it up until about four weeks ago, and then it tanked. We got some sickness in the house, and even though I never got full-blown sick, I could tell I was fighting something. I’m hoping that maybe I’ve just been training too hard while fighting something. I'm not good at taking it easy, but I may give myself a small break and see if things pop back up.
By the way, I used ChatGPT to generate some HRV experiments. I think I’ve been running too hard on my runs, so I’m going to keep heart rate below 130 or so for a bit and see what that does.
What’s tough about using ChatGPT for this is that I don’t have as much intuition to tell if it’s wrong.
When I’m doing business stuff with AI I can usually figure out when it’s going off the rails and giving bad advice. I’m not as smart about body stuff, so when it tells me to do x, y, or z, I can’t tell if that will drive positive change, do nothing, or even harm me. 🤨
Email me at heykev@kevinnoble.xyz and let me know how you’re doing on your goals for the year; let’s keep each other accountable.
Kevin 📈
A Quote
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Well, if you’re like me, it’s kind of fun for it to be a little complicated. If you want it totally easy and totally laid out, maybe you should join some cult that claims to provide all the answers. I don’t think that’s a good way to go. I think you’ll just have to endure the world, as complicated as it is.
It’s not Idiocracy yet, but we’re getting dumber. For a long time, an unexplained phenomenon called The Flynn Effect (named after the guy who discovered it) showed that human IQ was steadily increasing. However, that trend has begun to reverse, and intelligence is beginning to decline. Again, no clear explanation, but it does correlate with phone use. Reason number
Factory Five is an American company that’s been selling replica car kits for 30 years. You spend $15-35K on the kit, then combine it with parts from a donor car, and you get something like the Daytona Coupe - “real” versions of which cost up to $20M at auction. It’s a big project at 300 hours of assembly (if you know what you’re doing - which I don’t), but I can absolutely see myself building one of these in the next decade. Hard to decide between a Hot Rod, 1935 Truck, or the Cobra replica.
Formula 1’s race this weekend was held down the road in Austin at Circuit of the Americas (COTA). My boy Norris didn’t win, but it was a good race nonetheless. A lot less crashing than there was during the sprint race!
Deep Dive into Heart, Mind, and Will Styles
We all have natural leadership tendencies. Some of us emphasize our people skills. Some of us emphasize our intellectual capabilities. And some of us are extremely driven to get results.
Through genetics and environment, we develop a strength along one of these dimensions, and then continue leveraging that strength, developing it even further.
This strength becomes entwined with our identity. We continue leading in that way because not doing so would feel like it’s violating who we are.
The good news? Our strengths are strong! In the right circumstance, they’re effective.
The bad news? When done poorly, our strengths create competing liabilities, limiting our effectiveness.
You don’t need to give up your strength. You just need to know which of the three leadership style predominates, learn to leverage it more Creatively (I’ll explain this!), and then develop and incorporate the opposite skills.
Let’s dive into the three leadership styles...which one are you?
Content today comes heavily from “Scaling Leadership” by Robert J. Anderson and William A. Adams. It’s a highly-recommended ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ book. What I’m walking you through today is just one component of their overall leadership framework. I suggest you check out the book if this topic is of interest to you.
All quotes today are from that book.
Heart-Focused Leaders
These leaders are very relationship-oriented. Because they are focused on interpersonal dynamics, they tend to avoid controversy and conflict and keeping things positive. They want harmony and for everyone to get along.
In an immature form, their self worth depends on how others perceive them. Not having people like them feels awful. This means they often give away power in order to stay accepted by the group.
Unfortunately, giving away power means there isn’t much power left to pursue goals!
This style of leadership tends toward what the book calls Complying leadership, in the sense that they comply with external pressure in order to retain relationships.
The liabilities for this style of leadership can be poor decision making, a poorly articulated vision, and not holding the team accountable.
Their strengths are in their people skills, their calm presence, and being easy to work with.
“When the heart gets overused, however, and these skills are run Reactively, these leaders are experienced as conventional, cautious, submissive, self-centric, not holding the team accountable, too focused on pleasing others, indecisive, and failing to achieve results.”
Will-Focused Leaders
These leaders are the opposite of the heart-focused leaders; they move against others instead of toward them. They look to gain power at the expense of others. Other people are seen as “resources” that can help them get what they want.
They take power in order to get ahead (I’m sure you’ve met a few people like this!).
Their strength is having the willpower to make things happen, and pushing to get what they want.
In the immature form, their self worth depends on being the one to get results, to be in charge and in control.
While the heart-focused leader fears not having people like them, the will-focused leader fears failure; that’s considered the worst outcome.
Because they fear failure, they are what the book calls a Controlling type. They don’t delegate well. They don’t develop teamwork or trust.
The liabilities for this style of leadership can be poor listening, little emotional control, and not engaging with staff. They can be weak in personal relationships.
Their strengths are their relentless drive to achieve. They’re passionate and visionary.
“The strengths are often experienced by others as overdrive, perfectionism, 'workaholism,' excessive ambition, 'dictatorialness,' ineffective interaction style, poor listening, micromanaging, and over-demanding.”
Mind-Focused Leaders
Check out the big brain on Brad.
These leaders keep a rational and analytical distance from others. They’re typically quite intelligent, and seek knowledge and truth.
Their self worth depends on demonstrating their analytical and critical capabilities. They want others to see them as smart and self-sufficient.
They can stay in their head, assessing what’s going on around them in a detached way. As such, they have a strength in being calm and composed amid chaos and conflict. This can also make them seem cold, distant, critical, and arrogant.
The liabilities for this style of leadership can be in not developing their direct reports, putting others down, and having an ineffective interaction style. They can be seen as over-demanding and aloof.
Their strengths are in self-awareness, systems thinking, and problem solving.
“I score high on Protecting, and I often lead with a kind of critical arrogance. But if you think the words I say are critical, you ought to hear what’s going on inside my mind. You’re actually getting only about 1 percent of my Critical.”
- Author of “Scaling Leadership” sharing a personal anecdote that other Mind-Focused leaders can relate to.
Getting Creative
By now you’ve probably pinpointed which style of leadership you lean toward. Each of us has all three dimensions in us, but one tends to lead.
When you read about the liabilities, which each type has, it seems like no style of leadership would be effective. So what do we do?
The book connects this framework of leadership styles to another one I’ve talked about before, which I know as Forms of Mind, or Adult Development Theory. This theory describes the extent to which humans have improved their ability to handle mental complexity, progressing from Self-Sovereign, to Socialized, to Self-Authored, and Self-Transforming.
Most adults surpass the Self-Sovereign form that defines early childhood years, typified by the focus on being the most important thing in the world, into the Socialized form, where you get your values or perspectives from others.
More than half of adults are in the Socialized form of mind. Next is the Self-Authored form, where you develop your own principles, and start to define your own belief system. Lastly, there’s the Self-Transforming form, representing less than 1% of the population, where you can see the limitations of any one framework and hold multiple contradictory viewpoints.
In “Scaling Leadership,” the authors describe the immature form of the leadership styles as Reactive. It’s called this because it happens in an unconscious way - an event happens, and your brain reacts however the default wiring reacts. This connects into the Socialized stage of maturity.
It’s this unconscious nature that causes leadership done in this way - no matter the style - to be less effective. You over-index in one dimension and haven’t integrated multiple competing dichotomies into a more effective version.
The more advanced style of leadership is what they call Creative, and maps onto the Self-Authored form of mind.
So, to improve the effectiveness of your default leadership style, the task is to develop into a more Self-Authored form and beyond.
This is the lifelong task of leadership, not to mention personal development. In order to be a more effective human, it’s worth going through the very hard work of developing your mental complexity.
Since it’s a lifetime of work, I can’t unlock that path fully in one newsletter - that’s what the corpus of Catalyst newsletters can be used for. I can say that the path starts with self-awareness and intentionality. You need to see yourself clearly, often with the help of honest mirrors, and then really want to change.
As you develop more advanced forms of mind, the next stage of development is to incorporate competing skills into your style.
For example, I’m clearly a mind-focused leader, probably with some will-focused tendencies as well. Heart-focus is my weakest tendency. As such, it continues to be a development area for me. The more I can incorporate and blend in people-centered leadership, I can pair that with my mind- and will-focused skills to produce more effective outcomes.
Your development specifics will look different, but the contours are the same. - Figure out your predominant style. - Improve your mental complexity (the task of years, not weeks). - Incorporate skills from other styles.
Bringing it All Together
At our core, each of us leans on one style of leadership - heart, will, or mind. That strength is a gift and a trap; it drives our effectiveness in the right circumstances, but when run Reactively, it becomes a liability.
The real work of leadership isn’t abandoning your natural style, it’s integrating the others. As we mature and expand our mental complexity, we move from leading unconsciously and reactively to leading creatively and intentionally.
The journey from relying on one strength, to blending the full spectrum, is the essence of leadership development. It starts with self-awareness, honest feedback, and the courage to grow beyond our defaults.
Call to Action
The journey of increased mental complexity takes time, but it starts now.
Whatever your style, the strengths are probably clear to you, and a source of pride. But they also inform your blind spots.
A people-focused leader may not see the absence of results. The intellectually-focused leader may not the cold distance they create. The results-focused leader may not see they’re chewing through people.
So this week get some honest feedback. Is there someone who can show you the limitations of your strengths? What weaknesses you are blind to?
Don’t debate. Just listen. Then ask yourself: What part of me resists hearing this?
That resistance is the edge of your current form of mind, and the clue for your next step.
Kevin
PS - Don’t forget, your strengths and weaknesses will show up in your personal relationships, too! Your family and friends experience the same impact as your team. Your spouse, family, and friends can be helpful sources of feedback as well 😁
