795. Expert Interview: The Hidden Laws of Leadership

Blaine Bartlett

Blaine Bartlett is CEO and President of Avatar Resources, a global leadership development and consulting firm he founded in 1987. He has personally delivered training programs to more than a quarter of a million individuals and has directly impacted more than one million people worldwide. He is the author of four books – the #1 internationally best-seller “Compassionate Capitalism: A Journey to the Soul of Business, Discover Your Inner Strength,” co-authored with Stephen Covey, Ken Blanchard and Brian Tracy, and “Three-Dimensional Coaching: Moving Passion into Performance.” His latest book is “Tapping Into the Soul of Business: Key to Employee Engagement.”

The Hidden Laws of Leadership

“It occurred to me that we weren’t doing anybody a great service in the way that we were approaching the activity of training people to be leaders in their organizations because we were missing what I consider to be some of the hidden laws of leadership that are actually buried because they aren’t so objectively organized. Leadership for most people is an objective process. My experience is those that are particularly successful in the role of a leader, executing a leadership activity, is that there is far more subjectivity that comes into play. So I got real curious about what are the subjective dynamics that seem to be working here. And that’s where the notion of “the hidden laws of leadership” started to emerge.”

Why Is This Important?

“What gets to be really interesting is that on an annual basis organizations spend approximately $43 billion on leadership development with the intent of improving employee engagement—a very large number that doesn’t seem to be producing a whole lot of results. I think what’s missing is people’s ability to recognize, number one, that there’s something hidden from view. McKinsey and Company did a survey in 2016 with about 13,000 managers and leaders in organizations. Roughly 83% of them reported themselves as being “an inspirational leader.” Gallup, at the same time, came out with a poll that assessed leadership in organizations and 81% of people said that their leaders were fundamentally “uninspiring”—a huge disconnect. So the work that we’re doing today is essentially on the hidden law leadership and how we make them visible.”

What Are the Key Lessons Learned Here?

“How businesses are managed and led literally determines the wealth, health and well-being of everything on our planet. With this in mind it becomes incumbent on the leaders of businesses to ensure that the activities of their organizations are structured in ways that follow the admonishment of Hippocrates to ‘first do no harm.’ The fact that this is not the focus of most organizations poses a considerable challenge to leaders who aspire to inspire others and to do good works. It is also a major reason for what is essentially a pandemic of employee disengagement. Our approach presents a fundamental shift in the focus of the activities of both leadership and management in order to intentionally access the ‘soul’ of the business as a means to create sustainable employee engagement.”