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294: Create Cohesion with Dr. Chris Fuzie
Dr. Chris Fuzie, President of the National Leaderology Association and Founder of CMF Leadership Consulting, is on a mission to elevate leadership into a respected science—and to develop better leaders by grounding them in theory and behavior.
We dive into the emerging field of Leaderology and how Dr. Fuzie is working to verify and certify leadership practitioners as “Leaderologists.” He introduces the STICKUM Framework for building team cohesion through Sacrifice, Teamwork, Interaction, Communication, Keeping people focused, Unique norms and symbols, and Mission. Chris also explores the concept of Liminal Leadership—where leaders must seamlessly transition between leading and following—and explains how followership is as critical as leadership itself.
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Create Cohesion with Dr. Chris Fuzie
Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast. And my guest today is Dr. Chris Fuzie, president of the National Leaderology Association, a non-profit organization that establishes and promotes leaderology, the study of leadership as a respected discipline in science. He is also the owner of CMF Leadership Consulting. So without further ado, welcome to the show, Chris.
Thank you, Steve. I’m very happy to be here. Yeah, I’m looking forward to this.
Well, I have to tell you that we are 300 episodes in and you’re the first leaderologist that we ever had on this podcast. So it’s kind of a big day for us.
Oh, good.
So, what is leaderology? I’ve never heard this before, but it sure sounds interesting.
Well, okay, so you have psychology, you have psychologists. You have biology, you have biologists. You have all of these other ologies, which is the scientific study of or the study of whatever the discipline is. So leaderology is nothing more than the scientific study of leadership. So as a leaderologist, there’s different levels within leaderology. And
as a leaderologist, that means that you are formally educated in leadership theory and leadership practice.
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So, is this a trademark designation or anyone can call themselves a leaderologist who are expert in leadership?
Yeah, that’s the thing is that we actually verify that the person is a leaderologist. And so through the National Leaderology Association, what we do is in order to join, you have to submit your transcripts to show that you’ve actually studied leadership, not management, but leadership. I know you know the difference between management and leadership, but that’s why we look at the type of classes that people have taken, what is their dissertation on that kind of stuff. So we look at all that kind of stuff before we designate somebody. That’s why they’re called verified leaderologists, because they have been vetted, they have been verified as a leaderologist before we will say, yes, this person knows what they’re talking about.
Okay. That makes sense. So in terms of definition, my favorite definition is that you manage things and you lead people. What is your definition? What is the official designated definition of a leaderologist and the leader?
I say the same thing. Manage things, you lead people. But a leaderologist understands the theories behind the concepts of leading people. As an example, let’s use cohesion as an example. There’s different ways of building cohesion.
I use the acronym STICKUM. Personal sacrifice, teamwork, getting people to interact. C is communication. K is keeping people focused on the mission. U is unique norms and symbols. And then the M is the mission focus.
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If you think about all those things, when you look at cohesion, then it’s important that you use all of those things. Plus cohesion, you have task cohesion and social cohesion, and task cohesion and social cohesion develop differently. You could have a lot of people who are doing their tasks, but don’t get along. That’s task cohesion. But then you could also have the situation where people all get along, but they don’t get anything done. That’s social cohesion. You want to balance those out. How do you balance those out? Well, you have to look at what’s happening with task cohesion and social cohesion. And then in the team dynamic, you look at what’s going on with teams because cohesion is a group structural dimension, but it’s also a group process. So if you don’t know that kind of stuff and you just try to build cohesion by doing a team building, well, you have to understand how that team building works. You have to understand the theory behind that team building. That’s an example of why a leaderologist, they understand those theories behind the acts, behind the behavior, I should say.
That’s great. So we talked about a framework before the show, but I would like to pivot and talk about the Cohesion Framework, because it’s very interesting, even more interesting than the other one. So what are the steps? What is the STICKUM process?
It's STICKUM. You want to stick them together.
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So sometimes you force people to work together. That’s where the social cohesion, maybe you don’t have the social cohesion and you’re creating the social cohesion along with the task cohesion. And then the I is interaction. Basically the same thing. You’re forcing interaction between different people and you’re making that interaction more personal. And it could be interaction between teams also, teams within a team. So let’s say an organization that has multiple functions, those teams may work in more of a silo kind of situation. Well, you don’t want to do that. You want to have them cross training. So you may have to force some of that interaction. The C is communication and communication is one of those that people think they know how to communicate, but we tend to overlook things like active listening. We tend to overlook body language.
We do a lot of email, management by email or leading by email, that doesn’t work. And so you have to actually communicate. Not just communicate, get the words across, but find the shared meaning within the words. So that’s one of the things that I focus on is that, what does it mean to be honest? Are you talking about being honest? Are you talking about being transparent? Can we totally be transparent? Sometimes the law says you cannot say certain things. Sometimes, like my experience in courtrooms, that the judge will not allow you to testify to because it might unduly prejudice the jury. And so the lawyers fight about who’s gonna talk about it. And then the judge makes a ruling in that, no, you can’t do that because, and so we get to the shared meaning and what is the definition of something? You asked the question at the beginning, the leaderologist. That’s that shared meaning kind of thing. So that’s where communication comes in.
Keeping people focused. The K is keeping people focused. That’s important because who are you serving? Who are you working for? I mean, maybe I have a really boring job. I have a standing post at a winery in the middle of the night in a warehouse. There’s nobody there. But if you weren’t there, what could happen? And keeping people focused and letting people understand what their purpose is and why they’re doing it. In law enforcement, we talk about the victims, especially working at a district attorney’s office. You talk about the victims and we’re prosecuting the criminals and how we keep focused about the victims and society and keeping people safe. The measure of the effectiveness, the sense of safety in a community. So that’s keeping people focused and reminding people of that every single day.
The U is unique norms and symbols. And that’s like, well, you have it on your book back there. I have it on my shirt here. We have these unique norms and symbols that we create, but every single one of these can be functional or dysfunctional. The unique norms and symbols is how you identify gang members also. They have certain tattoos. All of these work, whether it’s a benevolent or malevolent kind of organization. And so that unique norm and symbol, if you see somebody with a, let’s say like, somebody in the Navy and they’re wearing one of the crests for the seals. That’s a unique, normal symbol that identifies what they’re doing. And then the last one is missions.
It's important for people to feel like their mission is important. And so we want to create missions or jobs or tasks that people feel they could be part of.
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That’s where we talk about buy-in, getting the buy-in. So there’s a lot in STICKUM that helps get people cohesive. And then when you think about it as part of the team dynamics, it’s a structure that helps build structure in the team because that helps with the interpersonal communication, it helps with the tasks and it helps with the structure of the team. And then it’s also a group process because that process is always changing. You’re always evaluating from the time you socialize somebody in the organization, you’re always evaluating how they’re doing and that mission is going to be helpful in getting them to do it. That’s a whole 40-minute class at about two minutes.
So, yeah, no, I love it. The sacrifice. So, that’s great because often leaders, CEOs, business owners, don’t realize that they have to show a personal sacrifice to the teams to be trusted by the team for them to really feel that they care about them. I like the idea of forcing people. I mean, I’ve never heard this articulated this before, but it really is true that sometimes people, it’s their comfort zone to be in their silos. They don’t want teamwork. It’s an extra layer of responsibility. They have to pay attention to other people. They can’t just imagine that their world is perfect. It is uncomfortable. So you have to force people.
The same with interaction. Again, comfort zone thing. Interacting meaning you have to pay attention to other people, you have to split your attention. Communication, I love this distinction of the active listening. People often think about communication that it’s about sending messages, but it’s equally receiving messages and often sending the body language and the other non-verbal messages are more important than the actual verbal ones. And then keeping people focused. I’m wondering the difference between keeping people focused and the mission.
So, the overall mission could be like the overarching goal of the organization. And so keeping people focused on either a task, keeping people focused on something that’s important, something they need to do, that kind of thing. It’s different in that the overall mission is creating a mission that they can buy into is going to be important, but keeping people focused on why, that’s the “Why.” The mission is more of the what. Keeping people focused on why they’re doing what they’re doing. Is it just to make money so they can pay their bills and go surfing all day? Maybe. Is it because they really believe in what they’re doing? And most jobs, you have to have both. Most jobs, you have to have the mission and the different missions involved. I keep using the word mission, but it can be a job, task, company. Because if the company doesn’t survive, you’re out of a job. So it doesn’t help.
Yeah. I mean, the “Why” and the “What,” in my word, I call it, I call it the Company Why and the Summit Vision, I call it. The long-term, a big, hairy, audacious goal, as Jim Collins would say, that a big overarching North Star goal is kind of the what, but the what can also be the core business. What do we focus on right now? What are we good at? And so on. So that is fascinating. I’m going to reflect on this myself because this is super valuable. So talking about the “Why,” what is your personal “Why” that you manifest in your practice?
My personal “Why” is I had some really bad leaders in my life, not all throughout my life, but I’ve had some really bad ones. It was like, there’s gotta be something to make it better. And it makes me better too. I was a cop until age 40. And I looked around and I saw a bunch of people that were starting to, some of my friends are starting to get hurt. At age 40, do you want to still be chasing people, jumping fences and running through backyards? And I said, no, I should probably come up with a backup plan. And so I went back to school, I started looking at this leadership stuff. And I realized that a lot of this org leadership stuff is working with what I was seeing every single day. And then I became a supervisor and seeing how people were interacting, fit right in with what I was learning in the theories and I could start applying those theories.
So then for the next almost 10 years, I was using the police department as like a little Petri dish, testing out some of these theories or writing about these theories that were I was actually seeing happen. I had some really, really good supervisors and really good leaders and then I had some really bad leaders and bad supervisors and it’s like what’s the difference? What is the difference? How come some turn out good, some turn out bad? What is it? Well, I’ve come to find out a lot of it is the theory. Not understanding people, not understanding how things are working, and that’s a big factor in all of this. So my personal “Why” is to get better and be better.
Okay, well, that sounds simple. It’s probably not easy all the time, but definitely interesting. Now, I’m really curious about a couple of things I wanted to talk to you. I mean, you said that you were a cop for a couple of decades and you talked about leadership and how you discovered some of the systems behind leadership as a cop. What is unique about being a first responder, whether it’s a cop or an emergency technician or a firefighter? What is unique in terms of leadership about being a first responder?
So what's really interesting is that you're not just leading and you're not just following. You're actually doing both at the same time.
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Now, you’re out of, you still have to control that person. So now the backup becomes the leader. And so in law enforcement, that happens all the time. I should say in emergency services, we get to a scene of a crime and we have somebody who’s hurt or injured. As soon as the firemen and the ambulance get there, they’re taking the lead on dealing with that person. I’ll get my information later on until they get them to the hospital and they deal with them. If there’s a safety concern, the firemen and the ambulance are going to stay back until we’ve dealt with the safety concern. And so everybody’s leading and following in their own right. And then, emergency services, you have a structure for that emergency service. But it’s just like in the military, the mission is what’s important. Not so much whether you’re leading or following, it’s how do we accomplish this mission or how do we accomplish this job that we need to do? And like I said, I didn’t realize this till about six years ago while I was focusing on followership stuff. And I realized that, that’s what I was doing for almost 30 years, leading and following.
So let me jump on this one because that’s also a very interesting concept that you talk about, the followership. Before I talked to you, I never heard about leaderology and let alone followership, that it was even a thing. So what is followership? Is this a skill?
Well, it’s a real thing. We’re in baseball season now. So let’s talk about baseball. Do you have a favorite team? Do you follow that team? Do you go a favorite team? Do you go to the stands? When you go to a baseball game in a stadium, there’s nine players on the field, another dozen or so in the dugout. There’s a couple down in the dugout, a couple dozen maybe, but there’s nine players on the field. But you have 40 or 60,000 fans sitting there all rooting for their team. That’s followership. Also, just imagine if we could get those 40,000 people or 60,000 people to do something just because somebody hits a home run, we all scream and yell. And if you think about it, if you go to the games and you hear like the organ player or the somebody, they do this thing where get everybody to clap or do the wave or whatever it is.
They do all these things to get the audience to keep the audience engaged and responding. And that's part of the game.
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So followership is driven by the leader? So, it’s not an active behavior from the followers. It’s something that the leader creates.
No, I think it’s both. I think it’s from the leader and the follower. A lot of people think of followership as being the opposite of leadership. That’s absolutely not. I do this thing in my classes where I talk about I’ll do a test. I could do it with you right now if you want. Okay, so I’m going to say a word. You tell me the opposite. You ready?
Okay.
Okay. Up.
Down.
In.
Out.
Fast.
Slow.
Leader.
Follower.
Right. Because that’s the mental schema we have. But when you think about follower, the follower is actually going the same direction as the leader. They’re not going in opposite direction. The follower is trying to achieve the same goal as the leader. They’re not trying to achieve a different goal and antithetical towards the ideals of the leader. We try to find people within our organization who have the same ideals. The leader and the follower are actually like two sides of the same coin, whereas you can’t spend just one side of the coin. You can only spend the whole coin. And so followership is, it’s both leading. And that’s where this last book I wrote, it’s called Liminal Leadership, because some people have to lead and follow at the same time. And if you’re a middle manager, if you’re president or supervisor, anywhere in that structure, you’re leading and following.
So I’m just trying to relate to this. So let’s say a company have a CEO, the visionary person, and then it has a COO, the second in command, who maybe is more focused on execution. Then would the visionary person be the leader and the COO, the follower?
Until it becomes an operational issue, then the COO should probably, there’s things that you know have happened, be the first one to do something. The CEO might trump him in authority, but may not have the expertise that the COO has.
But maybe they have a vision and the CEO can realize the vision. Would it not make the CEO a follower or practicing followership in terms of the visionary leader?
Correct. They are practicing followership, but they’re also leading all the other people that in that organization. And so I work for a district attorney’s office and I work directly for the elected district attorney. And the elected district attorney, he’s elected. So who does he follow? He follows the will of the people. The people can unelect them, they can kick him out, they can get rid of him, but he follows the will of the people. Well, when he tells me this is what we’re going to do, I have to say, okay, boss, and then I turn around and lead 164 other people in the district attorney’s office to get things done. But I have to follow and lead at the same time. And that’s where followership is sometimes even stronger than leadership because you have, like in my organization, I have 164 people that if they all said, ah, this is not a good idea, and then I turn to the boss, I go, hey boss, I’ve got all these people telling me this, and he may rethink it. And he does rethink it. It’s kind of great to work for somebody like that, who actually pays attention to what’s going on. So that followership does have a strong presence in every organization. I don’t think we’ve tapped into how to use it right, though.
That’s interesting. Very interesting topic. Probably we can’t do justice to it in 30 minutes, but there are different ideas that come to my mind. One is that, a good follower sometimes is harder to find than a leader.
Yeah.
Anyone can have ideas, but someone who can actually focus their attention to executing a set of ideas, it’s a very valuable person. I’m also thinking about the right kind of followership and the wrong kind of followership, because sometimes you have dogmatic followers or people who are uncritically following someone and bad things on their behalf. So there are multiple aspects to this. Before we wrap up, I wanted to ask you about Liminal Leadership. And I see the book behind you, the Liminal Space.
Yeah. Right back here.
So what does this mean? Liminal Space and Liminal Leadership.
Yeah. The word liminal means in a transitionary state. So it comes from anthropology where things would change like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. When it’s in the chrysalis and it’s hanging there, then it’s in a liminal state. So a person, I took that concept and applied it to leadership. A person that is leading and following at the same time, they have to transition from leading and following. And so if we think about the transition of leading and following, if you’re doing it at the same time, then it doesn’t really matter if you’re the leader or the follower at the time that you’re doing whatever it is you have to do. It’s the matter of getting that task or that behavior accomplished. So as an example, in like in my position at the DA’s office, the boss tells me something, I have to turn around and get other people to do it. Well, I’m in a liminal space when I’m in that position of doing both things. I’m not leading, I’m not following, I just have to do it.
So as an example, if you’re told to be honest, okay, does it matter if you’re honest as a leader or honest as a follower or as long as you’re honest? So that’s the thing.
This liminal space concept is people who have to lead and follow at the same time.
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Yeah, that’s fascinating. Well, definitely very deep discussion around the leadership.
Sorry.
No, that’s great. I mean, that’s this concept of the STICKUM, the cohesion, how to create cohesion. I’ve basically worked with teams and I’m working on creating that cohesion, but I didn’t have the STICKUM formula. And now I’m going to STICKUM together using the formula. I love it. It’s great. It’s very granular and one can work on the individual elements, the sacrifice, the teamwork, the interaction, communication, working on active listening, body language, norms and symbols, the big topic in itself, the mission, the “What,” the “Why.” This is very, very valuable. So if people would like to learn more about your books, your teachings, and maybe want to enroll themselves in the leadership, the Leaderology Institute, they want to become leaderologist themselves, or get a certification because they have done the studies, where should they go and where can they reach you?
My website is www.cmfleadership.com and there’s a contact message on there. I’m also on linkedin and facebook and what is it called now? X? Yeah, so I’m on all of those. And you just look for Chris Fuzie. Not too many people with the name of Fuzie, so you’ll find it pretty easy. For the books, they’re all on Amazon. So amazon.com. Again, just do a search for Chris Fuzie books and they’ll all pop up. There’s three behavior-based books. And then the others that are listed on there are workbooks for the classes that we do. And then for the leaderology, if you want to check out more about national leaderology association, go to www.nlainfo.org. It has a page on there to join. It has everything about what we do, why we do what we do. We tend to say it’s chess, not checkers. We’re playing chess, we’re playing the big game. And so it’s important that we talk about this from a scientific level, applying the scientific theories to what we do.
That is best. That really helps leaders become more intentional, and they can organically build their skills. They don’t have to just rely on role models and flying by the seat of their pants and figuring out as they go along, they can get into some very tangible concepts. So, Dr. Chris Fuzie, President of the National Leaderology Association, NLA, and the owner of the CMF Leadership Consulting Company. It was great having you on the show. You shared some really valuable stuff. I made some notes and I’m going to use them and check your books out. So if you enjoyed this show, then make sure that you subscribe, give us a review, follow us on YouTube, and stay tuned because every week, we bring either a successful entrepreneur or a subject matter expert like Dr. Fuzie, who will help you become a better leader and even a better follower. Thanks for coming on the show and thanks for listening.
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Dr. Chris Fuzie, President of the National Leaderology Association and Founder of CMF Leadership Consulting, is on a mission to elevate leadership into a respected science—and to develop better leaders by grounding them in theory and behavior.
We dive into the emerging field of Leaderology and how Dr. Fuzie is working to verify and certify leadership practitioners as “Leaderologists.” He introduces the STICKUM Framework for building team cohesion through Sacrifice, Teamwork, Interaction, Communication, Keeping people focused, Unique norms and symbols, and Mission. Chris also explores the concept of Liminal Leadership—where leaders must seamlessly transition between leading and following—and explains how followership is as critical as leadership itself.
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Create Cohesion with Dr. Chris Fuzie
Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast. And my guest today is Dr. Chris Fuzie, president of the National Leaderology Association, a non-profit organization that establishes and promotes leaderology, the study of leadership as a respected discipline in science. He is also the owner of CMF Leadership Consulting. So without further ado, welcome to the show, Chris.
Thank you, Steve. I’m very happy to be here. Yeah, I’m looking forward to this.
Well, I have to tell you that we are 300 episodes in and you’re the first leaderologist that we ever had on this podcast. So it’s kind of a big day for us.
Oh, good.
So, what is leaderology? I’ve never heard this before, but it sure sounds interesting.
Well, okay, so you have psychology, you have psychologists. You have biology, you have biologists. You have all of these other ologies, which is the scientific study of or the study of whatever the discipline is. So leaderology is nothing more than the scientific study of leadership. So as a leaderologist, there’s different levels within leaderology. And
as a leaderologist, that means that you are formally educated in leadership theory and leadership practice.
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So, is this a trademark designation or anyone can call themselves a leaderologist who are expert in leadership?
Yeah, that’s the thing is that we actually verify that the person is a leaderologist. And so through the National Leaderology Association, what we do is in order to join, you have to submit your transcripts to show that you’ve actually studied leadership, not management, but leadership. I know you know the difference between management and leadership, but that’s why we look at the type of classes that people have taken, what is their dissertation on that kind of stuff. So we look at all that kind of stuff before we designate somebody. That’s why they’re called verified leaderologists, because they have been vetted, they have been verified as a leaderologist before we will say, yes, this person knows what they’re talking about.
Okay. That makes sense. So in terms of definition, my favorite definition is that you manage things and you lead people. What is your definition? What is the official designated definition of a leaderologist and the leader?
I say the same thing. Manage things, you lead people. But a leaderologist understands the theories behind the concepts of leading people. As an example, let’s use cohesion as an example. There’s different ways of building cohesion.
I use the acronym STICKUM. Personal sacrifice, teamwork, getting people to interact. C is communication. K is keeping people focused on the mission. U is unique norms and symbols. And then the M is the mission focus.
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If you think about all those things, when you look at cohesion, then it’s important that you use all of those things. Plus cohesion, you have task cohesion and social cohesion, and task cohesion and social cohesion develop differently. You could have a lot of people who are doing their tasks, but don’t get along. That’s task cohesion. But then you could also have the situation where people all get along, but they don’t get anything done. That’s social cohesion. You want to balance those out. How do you balance those out? Well, you have to look at what’s happening with task cohesion and social cohesion. And then in the team dynamic, you look at what’s going on with teams because cohesion is a group structural dimension, but it’s also a group process. So if you don’t know that kind of stuff and you just try to build cohesion by doing a team building, well, you have to understand how that team building works. You have to understand the theory behind that team building. That’s an example of why a leaderologist, they understand those theories behind the acts, behind the behavior, I should say.
That’s great. So we talked about a framework before the show, but I would like to pivot and talk about the Cohesion Framework, because it’s very interesting, even more interesting than the other one. So what are the steps? What is the STICKUM process?
It's STICKUM. You want to stick them together.
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So sometimes you force people to work together. That’s where the social cohesion, maybe you don’t have the social cohesion and you’re creating the social cohesion along with the task cohesion. And then the I is interaction. Basically the same thing. You’re forcing interaction between different people and you’re making that interaction more personal. And it could be interaction between teams also, teams within a team. So let’s say an organization that has multiple functions, those teams may work in more of a silo kind of situation. Well, you don’t want to do that. You want to have them cross training. So you may have to force some of that interaction. The C is communication and communication is one of those that people think they know how to communicate, but we tend to overlook things like active listening. We tend to overlook body language.
We do a lot of email, management by email or leading by email, that doesn’t work. And so you have to actually communicate. Not just communicate, get the words across, but find the shared meaning within the words. So that’s one of the things that I focus on is that, what does it mean to be honest? Are you talking about being honest? Are you talking about being transparent? Can we totally be transparent? Sometimes the law says you cannot say certain things. Sometimes, like my experience in courtrooms, that the judge will not allow you to testify to because it might unduly prejudice the jury. And so the lawyers fight about who’s gonna talk about it. And then the judge makes a ruling in that, no, you can’t do that because, and so we get to the shared meaning and what is the definition of something? You asked the question at the beginning, the leaderologist. That’s that shared meaning kind of thing. So that’s where communication comes in.
Keeping people focused. The K is keeping people focused. That’s important because who are you serving? Who are you working for? I mean, maybe I have a really boring job. I have a standing post at a winery in the middle of the night in a warehouse. There’s nobody there. But if you weren’t there, what could happen? And keeping people focused and letting people understand what their purpose is and why they’re doing it. In law enforcement, we talk about the victims, especially working at a district attorney’s office. You talk about the victims and we’re prosecuting the criminals and how we keep focused about the victims and society and keeping people safe. The measure of the effectiveness, the sense of safety in a community. So that’s keeping people focused and reminding people of that every single day.
The U is unique norms and symbols. And that’s like, well, you have it on your book back there. I have it on my shirt here. We have these unique norms and symbols that we create, but every single one of these can be functional or dysfunctional. The unique norms and symbols is how you identify gang members also. They have certain tattoos. All of these work, whether it’s a benevolent or malevolent kind of organization. And so that unique norm and symbol, if you see somebody with a, let’s say like, somebody in the Navy and they’re wearing one of the crests for the seals. That’s a unique, normal symbol that identifies what they’re doing. And then the last one is missions.
It's important for people to feel like their mission is important. And so we want to create missions or jobs or tasks that people feel they could be part of.
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That’s where we talk about buy-in, getting the buy-in. So there’s a lot in STICKUM that helps get people cohesive. And then when you think about it as part of the team dynamics, it’s a structure that helps build structure in the team because that helps with the interpersonal communication, it helps with the tasks and it helps with the structure of the team. And then it’s also a group process because that process is always changing. You’re always evaluating from the time you socialize somebody in the organization, you’re always evaluating how they’re doing and that mission is going to be helpful in getting them to do it. That’s a whole 40-minute class at about two minutes.
So, yeah, no, I love it. The sacrifice. So, that’s great because often leaders, CEOs, business owners, don’t realize that they have to show a personal sacrifice to the teams to be trusted by the team for them to really feel that they care about them. I like the idea of forcing people. I mean, I’ve never heard this articulated this before, but it really is true that sometimes people, it’s their comfort zone to be in their silos. They don’t want teamwork. It’s an extra layer of responsibility. They have to pay attention to other people. They can’t just imagine that their world is perfect. It is uncomfortable. So you have to force people.
The same with interaction. Again, comfort zone thing. Interacting meaning you have to pay attention to other people, you have to split your attention. Communication, I love this distinction of the active listening. People often think about communication that it’s about sending messages, but it’s equally receiving messages and often sending the body language and the other non-verbal messages are more important than the actual verbal ones. And then keeping people focused. I’m wondering the difference between keeping people focused and the mission.
So, the overall mission could be like the overarching goal of the organization. And so keeping people focused on either a task, keeping people focused on something that’s important, something they need to do, that kind of thing. It’s different in that the overall mission is creating a mission that they can buy into is going to be important, but keeping people focused on why, that’s the “Why.” The mission is more of the what. Keeping people focused on why they’re doing what they’re doing. Is it just to make money so they can pay their bills and go surfing all day? Maybe. Is it because they really believe in what they’re doing? And most jobs, you have to have both. Most jobs, you have to have the mission and the different missions involved. I keep using the word mission, but it can be a job, task, company. Because if the company doesn’t survive, you’re out of a job. So it doesn’t help.
Yeah. I mean, the “Why” and the “What,” in my word, I call it, I call it the Company Why and the Summit Vision, I call it. The long-term, a big, hairy, audacious goal, as Jim Collins would say, that a big overarching North Star goal is kind of the what, but the what can also be the core business. What do we focus on right now? What are we good at? And so on. So that is fascinating. I’m going to reflect on this myself because this is super valuable. So talking about the “Why,” what is your personal “Why” that you manifest in your practice?
My personal “Why” is I had some really bad leaders in my life, not all throughout my life, but I’ve had some really bad ones. It was like, there’s gotta be something to make it better. And it makes me better too. I was a cop until age 40. And I looked around and I saw a bunch of people that were starting to, some of my friends are starting to get hurt. At age 40, do you want to still be chasing people, jumping fences and running through backyards? And I said, no, I should probably come up with a backup plan. And so I went back to school, I started looking at this leadership stuff. And I realized that a lot of this org leadership stuff is working with what I was seeing every single day. And then I became a supervisor and seeing how people were interacting, fit right in with what I was learning in the theories and I could start applying those theories.
So then for the next almost 10 years, I was using the police department as like a little Petri dish, testing out some of these theories or writing about these theories that were I was actually seeing happen. I had some really, really good supervisors and really good leaders and then I had some really bad leaders and bad supervisors and it’s like what’s the difference? What is the difference? How come some turn out good, some turn out bad? What is it? Well, I’ve come to find out a lot of it is the theory. Not understanding people, not understanding how things are working, and that’s a big factor in all of this. So my personal “Why” is to get better and be better.
Okay, well, that sounds simple. It’s probably not easy all the time, but definitely interesting. Now, I’m really curious about a couple of things I wanted to talk to you. I mean, you said that you were a cop for a couple of decades and you talked about leadership and how you discovered some of the systems behind leadership as a cop. What is unique about being a first responder, whether it’s a cop or an emergency technician or a firefighter? What is unique in terms of leadership about being a first responder?
So what's really interesting is that you're not just leading and you're not just following. You're actually doing both at the same time.
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Now, you’re out of, you still have to control that person. So now the backup becomes the leader. And so in law enforcement, that happens all the time. I should say in emergency services, we get to a scene of a crime and we have somebody who’s hurt or injured. As soon as the firemen and the ambulance get there, they’re taking the lead on dealing with that person. I’ll get my information later on until they get them to the hospital and they deal with them. If there’s a safety concern, the firemen and the ambulance are going to stay back until we’ve dealt with the safety concern. And so everybody’s leading and following in their own right. And then, emergency services, you have a structure for that emergency service. But it’s just like in the military, the mission is what’s important. Not so much whether you’re leading or following, it’s how do we accomplish this mission or how do we accomplish this job that we need to do? And like I said, I didn’t realize this till about six years ago while I was focusing on followership stuff. And I realized that, that’s what I was doing for almost 30 years, leading and following.
So let me jump on this one because that’s also a very interesting concept that you talk about, the followership. Before I talked to you, I never heard about leaderology and let alone followership, that it was even a thing. So what is followership? Is this a skill?
Well, it’s a real thing. We’re in baseball season now. So let’s talk about baseball. Do you have a favorite team? Do you follow that team? Do you go a favorite team? Do you go to the stands? When you go to a baseball game in a stadium, there’s nine players on the field, another dozen or so in the dugout. There’s a couple down in the dugout, a couple dozen maybe, but there’s nine players on the field. But you have 40 or 60,000 fans sitting there all rooting for their team. That’s followership. Also, just imagine if we could get those 40,000 people or 60,000 people to do something just because somebody hits a home run, we all scream and yell. And if you think about it, if you go to the games and you hear like the organ player or the somebody, they do this thing where get everybody to clap or do the wave or whatever it is.
They do all these things to get the audience to keep the audience engaged and responding. And that's part of the game.
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So followership is driven by the leader? So, it’s not an active behavior from the followers. It’s something that the leader creates.
No, I think it’s both. I think it’s from the leader and the follower. A lot of people think of followership as being the opposite of leadership. That’s absolutely not. I do this thing in my classes where I talk about I’ll do a test. I could do it with you right now if you want. Okay, so I’m going to say a word. You tell me the opposite. You ready?
Okay.
Okay. Up.
Down.
In.
Out.
Fast.
Slow.
Leader.
Follower.
Right. Because that’s the mental schema we have. But when you think about follower, the follower is actually going the same direction as the leader. They’re not going in opposite direction. The follower is trying to achieve the same goal as the leader. They’re not trying to achieve a different goal and antithetical towards the ideals of the leader. We try to find people within our organization who have the same ideals. The leader and the follower are actually like two sides of the same coin, whereas you can’t spend just one side of the coin. You can only spend the whole coin. And so followership is, it’s both leading. And that’s where this last book I wrote, it’s called Liminal Leadership, because some people have to lead and follow at the same time. And if you’re a middle manager, if you’re president or supervisor, anywhere in that structure, you’re leading and following.
So I’m just trying to relate to this. So let’s say a company have a CEO, the visionary person, and then it has a COO, the second in command, who maybe is more focused on execution. Then would the visionary person be the leader and the COO, the follower?
Until it becomes an operational issue, then the COO should probably, there’s things that you know have happened, be the first one to do something. The CEO might trump him in authority, but may not have the expertise that the COO has.
But maybe they have a vision and the CEO can realize the vision. Would it not make the CEO a follower or practicing followership in terms of the visionary leader?
Correct. They are practicing followership, but they’re also leading all the other people that in that organization. And so I work for a district attorney’s office and I work directly for the elected district attorney. And the elected district attorney, he’s elected. So who does he follow? He follows the will of the people. The people can unelect them, they can kick him out, they can get rid of him, but he follows the will of the people. Well, when he tells me this is what we’re going to do, I have to say, okay, boss, and then I turn around and lead 164 other people in the district attorney’s office to get things done. But I have to follow and lead at the same time. And that’s where followership is sometimes even stronger than leadership because you have, like in my organization, I have 164 people that if they all said, ah, this is not a good idea, and then I turn to the boss, I go, hey boss, I’ve got all these people telling me this, and he may rethink it. And he does rethink it. It’s kind of great to work for somebody like that, who actually pays attention to what’s going on. So that followership does have a strong presence in every organization. I don’t think we’ve tapped into how to use it right, though.
That’s interesting. Very interesting topic. Probably we can’t do justice to it in 30 minutes, but there are different ideas that come to my mind. One is that, a good follower sometimes is harder to find than a leader.
Yeah.
Anyone can have ideas, but someone who can actually focus their attention to executing a set of ideas, it’s a very valuable person. I’m also thinking about the right kind of followership and the wrong kind of followership, because sometimes you have dogmatic followers or people who are uncritically following someone and bad things on their behalf. So there are multiple aspects to this. Before we wrap up, I wanted to ask you about Liminal Leadership. And I see the book behind you, the Liminal Space.
Yeah. Right back here.
So what does this mean? Liminal Space and Liminal Leadership.
Yeah. The word liminal means in a transitionary state. So it comes from anthropology where things would change like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. When it’s in the chrysalis and it’s hanging there, then it’s in a liminal state. So a person, I took that concept and applied it to leadership. A person that is leading and following at the same time, they have to transition from leading and following. And so if we think about the transition of leading and following, if you’re doing it at the same time, then it doesn’t really matter if you’re the leader or the follower at the time that you’re doing whatever it is you have to do. It’s the matter of getting that task or that behavior accomplished. So as an example, in like in my position at the DA’s office, the boss tells me something, I have to turn around and get other people to do it. Well, I’m in a liminal space when I’m in that position of doing both things. I’m not leading, I’m not following, I just have to do it.
So as an example, if you’re told to be honest, okay, does it matter if you’re honest as a leader or honest as a follower or as long as you’re honest? So that’s the thing.
This liminal space concept is people who have to lead and follow at the same time.
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Yeah, that’s fascinating. Well, definitely very deep discussion around the leadership.
Sorry.
No, that’s great. I mean, that’s this concept of the STICKUM, the cohesion, how to create cohesion. I’ve basically worked with teams and I’m working on creating that cohesion, but I didn’t have the STICKUM formula. And now I’m going to STICKUM together using the formula. I love it. It’s great. It’s very granular and one can work on the individual elements, the sacrifice, the teamwork, the interaction, communication, working on active listening, body language, norms and symbols, the big topic in itself, the mission, the “What,” the “Why.” This is very, very valuable. So if people would like to learn more about your books, your teachings, and maybe want to enroll themselves in the leadership, the Leaderology Institute, they want to become leaderologist themselves, or get a certification because they have done the studies, where should they go and where can they reach you?
My website is www.cmfleadership.com and there’s a contact message on there. I’m also on linkedin and facebook and what is it called now? X? Yeah, so I’m on all of those. And you just look for Chris Fuzie. Not too many people with the name of Fuzie, so you’ll find it pretty easy. For the books, they’re all on Amazon. So amazon.com. Again, just do a search for Chris Fuzie books and they’ll all pop up. There’s three behavior-based books. And then the others that are listed on there are workbooks for the classes that we do. And then for the leaderology, if you want to check out more about national leaderology association, go to www.nlainfo.org. It has a page on there to join. It has everything about what we do, why we do what we do. We tend to say it’s chess, not checkers. We’re playing chess, we’re playing the big game. And so it’s important that we talk about this from a scientific level, applying the scientific theories to what we do.
That is best. That really helps leaders become more intentional, and they can organically build their skills. They don’t have to just rely on role models and flying by the seat of their pants and figuring out as they go along, they can get into some very tangible concepts. So, Dr. Chris Fuzie, President of the National Leaderology Association, NLA, and the owner of the CMF Leadership Consulting Company. It was great having you on the show. You shared some really valuable stuff. I made some notes and I’m going to use them and check your books out. So if you enjoyed this show, then make sure that you subscribe, give us a review, follow us on YouTube, and stay tuned because every week, we bring either a successful entrepreneur or a subject matter expert like Dr. Fuzie, who will help you become a better leader and even a better follower. Thanks for coming on the show and thanks for listening.
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