As leaders, we have privilege, and it’s up to us to empower the people we’ve been charged to lead.

 

Today’s guest, Mike Yates, empowers people on a daily basis. Mike is an educator, the host of the Schoolish podcast, TED talker, and runs the Reinvention Lab at Teach for America. In this episode, he sits down with host Richard Lindner to talk about recognizing privilege and power structures and how leaders everywhere can leverage that knowledge to gain a better understanding of their team.

 

Mike’s journey is fascinating and unconventional, and he’s doing some pretty awesome things with his life.

 

Jack Of All Trades: An Insult or a Compliment?

Mike grew up hating school. His mom was a teacher, so that didn’t go over very well in his house. He remembers being raised to be a well-rounded person, so he had his hands in a lot of stuff. “No one ever told me to hyper-specialize,” he says, “and I developed an ability to multitask. I decided to use my varied interests as a strength.”

 

Ironically, he became a teacher, and not surprisingly, he hated it. So he found a side hustle which led him to build a teacherless school that utilizes technology in cool ways. He built his personal brand, started a podcast, and became a jack of all trades, a phrase he discovered is actually misquoted (or incompletely quoted) most of the time. The actual phrase is “A jack of all trades is a master of none but better than a master of one.”

 

Richard, who identifies as a “generalist,” was thrilled to hear him say that. It took Richard a long time to appreciate that quality in himself. It always seemed to him like the most successful people had an extremely narrow area of focus, while Richard was just generally good at a lot of different things. Now he realizes that, if you want to excel organizationally as a leader, you have to have a general understanding of how every area of the company works. 

 

The Culture of Power

Richard loved Mike’s TED talk on recognizing privilege and asked him to break down the culture of power for listeners. Mike says that the “culture of power” is a phrase coined by Lisa Delpit. It’s this idea that power structures exist all around us. 

 

Mike used the example of his mostly Black and Latino students, who would say to him from a place of major deficit, “I could never go to college. I’ll never be Bill Gates or Elon Musk or Lebron James.” Mike would try to dig deep to find something to help empower them. “No, you’re probably not going to be Lebron James, but you can be JJ Redick, if you do the right things and can see yourself differently.” He wanted them to have an alternate way of viewing what they thought were deficiencies. 

 

Each of us needs to understand power structures and accept where we have privilege. There’s white privilege (which people get all up in arms about), but there are other privileges too. “I speak English,” Mike says. “As long as I live in the U.S., that gives me an advantage. I have the use of all my limbs. I went to college. My mom went to college. There are things that give me privilege.”

 

Empowering Those You’re Charged With Leading

Mike says that, as a leader, your words carry a lot of weight. When you recognize the qualities and skills of the people you lead, you can metaphorically lift their chin when you see greatness in them. He knows a guy who’s often the most powerful person in the room. He saw something in Mike back in the day, and told him so, and it made a huge difference in Mike’s life. Good leaders help their people see themselves as powerful, give them that chin-up moment.

 

Richard agrees. “You don’t need to flex your power for people to know you have it,” he says. “True leadership...