Ep.234 The Four Choices Every Leader Makes

Leadership isn’t about titles or authority. It’s about the choices you make every day and how those choices influence the people around you.

In this episode, David Wheatley shares a simple but powerful framework built on two continuums, care and commitment, that reveal four distinct leadership choices. From destructive to transformative, these choices show up everywhere, even on the sidelines of a youth soccer game.

You’ll learn how to recognize your own patterns, how to shift toward choices that serve the greater good, and why this model sits at the heart of Humanergy’s work over the past 25 years.

Find the Four Choices model and more tools, visit Humanergy.com/freebies.

Learn more about Humanergy's work: https://www.humanergy.com

Join the Humanergy community on LinkedIn.

Sign up for our FREE leadership workshops.

Transcript

Well, welcome to this episode. I'm your host, David Wheatley. And if you are watching this on the YouTube site, there's an image of me playing soccer. I was told it was a legal requirement, somebody with my accent, when you came to this country, that you had to coach soccer. It was just part of what you had to do.

And so I started coaching my kids in soccer and it turned out that I was the only coach that had ever really played the game. And so then I ended up coaching the other coaches.

Because I'm coaching the other coaches, I'm the only one that's played the game. I'm the only one that seems to know the rules. So I'm refereeing as well. And you probably, if you've ever coached your kids, been in that situation that if you're doing all those things, you might as well be on the committee too.

And so lo and behold, my wife and I ran the AYSO program in our local area for about 10 years. And what I would discover every Saturday afternoon as I blew the final whistle on the last game, my last job being to take the nets down and put them in the shed, I'd see parental choices on the sidelines and four distinct groups.

There’d be those people who were coming towards me, finger cocked and loaded, ready to give me the full benefit of his or her opinion as to how my last call has destroyed their six-year-old’s chances of playing in the next World Cup.

Then there’d be those people who were always on the sidelines, but they'd always be too busy breathing or something to help out. In fact, if you called them and said, if you don't help, your kid's not going to have a team, they'd say, that's a shame.

Then there'd be a third group of people who, if you said, can somebody help me take the nets down, they'd be more than willing to come and help take the nets down.

And finally, the fourth group of people. When I blew the final whistle and I looked at the sidelines, there’d be nobody there. And it's because this fourth group of people had already recognized that the last thing that had to happen for us all to get out of there was for the nets to come down. They’d sorted the other parents to go start taking the nets down.

Now the challenge of this, when I saw this experience maybe 20 years ago, is that you recognize that we all make choices on a daily basis that influence and impact the people around us. And all four of those groups are making distinct choices that are having an influence on the people who are around them.

And so you can plot those. And this is at the heart of everything that Humanergy has done over the last 25 years. That leadership is not about the title, the position, the rank, the points, the size of your office.

It's everything to do with the choices you make that influence and impact the people around you.

And we can look at those on two continuums to start off with. Where’s your focus of care? And this goes from caring for yourself all the way up to caring for the greater good, which includes yourself.

The other continuum is what's the level of commitment you have? Are you committed to your comfort, to take the path of least resistance, or are you committed to impact?

When you plot those two continuums, you end up with a nice grid and potentially four choices that map out the same choices that I would see on the sidelines of the soccer game on a Saturday afternoon.

The first one, the bottom right-hand corner, we have a high level of commitment, so commitment to impact, but self-focused. It's what I would call a destructive leadership choice. It's when I'll do what is good for me, potentially at the cost of other people. And I'm highly committed to that.

It can sometimes be as simple as somebody who's just called a meeting and got everybody sat down in that meeting and then takes a phone call while everybody’s sat in the meeting. Their focus, their attention is on themselves and what their need is right then at the cost of everybody that they've asked into that meeting. And they're usually highly committed to that call.

If we slide along the commitment continuum from a place of impact to a place of comfort, then we have what I call a passive leadership choice. This is when we take the path of least resistance. We'll do what's easiest for us. So I've got a low level of commitment, a commitment to comfort, and I'm focused on myself. This is an easy one to fall into. It's really the lazy quadrant.

The difference maker is when we go up the vertical continuum, the care continuum, and at worst, we make a productive leadership choice, which is when I see the greater good and I might still only have a commitment to comfort, but I will help us succeed. When the referee asks for help, the parent says, yeah, I'll help you take the nets down, because they understand the greater good, but then there's a passivity to that greater good.

The best one is when we're in the top right-hand corner and we're actually seeing that greater good, but we're committed to impact. So we see the greater good, including ourselves, we're committed to impact, we make what I call a transformative leadership choice, when I will ensure that we collectively are successful.

In 25 years, Humanergy’s work has been to help people make more choices in the top half than the bottom half, where we see people making more productive and transformative leadership choices, where their choices are around the greater good.

If we make choices that impact the people around us in a positive way, then that makes us leaders and people of influence within that group.

This is at the heart of everything. It's at the heart of the Green Path. It's at the heart of What Great Teams Do Great. And you can read more about it at What Great Teams Do Great, or you can find a picture of the model in the tools section of Humanergy.com.