312. Less Control, More Conscious Influence: The Leadership Shift We Need Now with Mick Spiers

Feeling busy yet strangely stuck? We pull together a month of conversations to reveal a clearer path: lead with conscious influence, not control. Across three standout themes—self-leadership, emotional fitness, and meeting design—we show how small, intentional choices create outsized cultural ripple effects.

We start by reframing where leadership lives: not in titles or dashboards, but in behavior and micro moments. Tracy Clark’s lens on self-awareness challenges us to look for where we unintentionally bottleneck our teams by over controlling or rushing to certainty. The move is from hero to catalyst—asking better questions, creating space for others to step up, and letting curiosity replace the need to be right. You’ll hear practical reflection prompts and a simple weekly action to step back once and watch ownership grow.

Next, we add emotional depth with Melinda McCormack. People do not leave their lives at the door, and disengagement rarely happens overnight. We practice the intentional pause: notice, name, and ask why this emotion, why now, then choose a values-aligned response. Treat emotions as data that point to met or unmet needs—belonging, respect, significance. This is how leaders create psychological safety, regulate under pressure, and earn trust that compounds over time.

Finally, Rebecca Hinds equips us to reclaim our calendars. Meetings aren’t bad; they’re badly designed. We challenge visibility bias, clarify purpose, and treat meetings like a product with users, outcomes, and constraints. You’ll learn how to run a calendar reset, redesign who’s in the room, set tighter timeboxes, and use small structural tweaks—like 3:05 starts—to protect energy. One better meeting can reset a team’s focus and signal what your culture truly values.

We close with an integrated challenge: lead one moment with self-awareness, handle one situation with empathy and emotional regulation, and redesign one meeting to be more intentional. Ready to trade busyness for impact? Subscribe, share with a leader who needs this, and leave a review with the one change you’ll try this week.

Transcript

The Real Leadership Challenge

Mick Spiers 0:01

Have you ever felt like leadership is getting harder? Even though we have more tools, more data, and more frameworks than ever before? Have you ever looked around your workplace and thought, people are busy, but something feels off? And have you ever wondered whether the real leadership challenge right now isn't strategy or performance, but how we show up as humans at work? If any of those questions resonate with you, this February reflection is for you. Hey everyone and welcome back to The Leadership Project. Today is our February solo cast where we step back from individual episodes, connect the dots, and ask a bigger question. What are our leaders really being asked to do right now? Because when you put this month's conversation side by side, a very clear picture emerges. Not about productivity, not about hustle, but about presence, empathy, and intentional design. If I had to summarize February in one sentence, it would be this. Leadership today is less about control and more about conscious influence. Across all three conversations, we kept coming back to the same tension. Leaders mean well, but the impact doesn't always match the intention. As I often say, people don't wake up in the morning, rub their hands together and go, what can I do today to be a real jerk? This is not intentional. People don't feel unsafe because leaders are malicious. They feel unsafe because leaders are rushed, distracted, reactive, or operating on autopilot. February was a reminder that culture is created in moments, micro moments. Leadership lives in behavior, not titles. And the small choices often create the biggest ripple effects. So let's reflect on each of our guests. Start with Tracy Clark and leadership starting with self. Tracy challenged us to look at leadership in a way many people avoid by starting with ourselves. Her central message was simple but uncomfortable. You can't unlock the potential of others if you're not aware of how you're showing up. We spoke about leaders unintentionally becoming bottlenecks, the gap between intention and impact, and how identity, curiosity, and even play shape performance. What really stood out for me was this idea. Most leaders don't limit their teams on purpose, they do it unconsciously through over control, a lack of certainty, or a fear of letting go. So here are my reflection questions for you from this conversation. Where might you unintentionally be limiting your team? And are you creating space for others to step up or are you filling in the gaps yourself? And what would change if you led with curiosity instead of certainty? But overall, how can you become more of a catalyst than a bottleneck? So here's your call to action this week. Choose one moment to step back instead of stepping in. Let someone else lead the conversation, the decision, or the solution, and notice what happens. Become that catalyst. Allow others to learn, grow, and take ownership. All right, on to Melinda McCormack. And where we spoke about leadership being emotional work. The conversation with Melinda McCormack added emotional depth to the month. Melinda shared very openly her own personal journey of loss, trauma, and disconnection. And she reminded us of something many workplaces still struggle to accept. People don't leave work at the door. They bring their full emotional lives with them. We talked about emotional fitness, about empathy as a leadership edge, and the slow, quiet way people disconnect when they don't feel seen or safe. One of the most powerful ideas from this episode was that disengagement rarely happens overnight. It happens through a thousand small moments of disconnection. So my reflection questions for you from that interview are how emotionally safe do people feel around you? Do you respond or do you react when under pressure? And when was the last time you worked on your own emotional fitness? So the call to action here is practice one intentional pause each day for the next week. When something triggers you, pause. Name the emotion. Name it with clarity. Ask yourself, what is this emotion? Why this emotion? Why this emotion now? What triggered it? And then choose a response that's aligned with your values, not your impulse. Now, to be clear, everyone is emotional and we all make decisions emotional. But the more intentional we are with it, the more we'll get a better result. And emotion at the end of the day is information. It's trying to draw your attention towards something, either a met need or an unmet need. A positive emotion, like happiness, is trying to reward you for a met need, the need for love and belonging, the need for a bit of fun, the need to feel that you matter. A negative emotion is trying to tell you about an unmet need. That you feel that you don't belong, that you feel that you're not being respected, that you feel like you're not being valued. So we need to pay attention to these emotions. Notice the emotion, name the emotion, why this emotion, why this emotion now? And then choose a response that is aligned with your values, not your impulse. And that pause is where leadership lives. Okay, on to Rebecca Hinds. And we spoke here a lot about meetings and how they can become the biggest bugbear in your life and in the life of your teams, unless we look at it intentionally. So this conversation grounded everything about meetings in systems and design. Rebecca challenged one of the most accepted frustrations in modern work that meetings don't have to be bad. They're designed that way, unintentionally. We let it get away on us. So we need to step in and take some intentional steps to take back control of our meeting culture in our organizations. We explored some really interesting concepts within there. The visibility bias that equates busyness with value. That seems to be a badge of honor to be busy and jump from meeting to meeting. Not to sit back and think, well, did those meetings actually achieve anything? So the busyness is being valued rather than the outcomes. We also explored how a lack of clarity fuels unnecessary meetings. And with some intentional actions, we could dramatically cut down on the amount of meetings that we're having. And this is why leaders must treat meetings as a product, not a default. The insight that stayed with me most was this every meeting sends a cultural signal about what matters, about whose time is valued, and about how decisions get made. So my reflection questions to you here are to look at your calendar and to do a reset. Have a look at all of the meetings in your calendar and think about whether they really need to exist. For the meetings that do need to exist, are they designed for the people attending or just for you? And what change would happen if you treated time as something to invest, not to spend? So you call to action, go through your calendar, look at all of the meetings in your calendar, maybe even go as extreme as Rebecca recommended and delete them all and only reinsert the ones into your calendar that really need to be meeting. And for the ones that don't need to be meetings, how else might you achieve the purpose of that meeting in a different way? Can it be asynchronous? Can it be a communication? And then for the meetings that do stay, think about how you could redesign them. Think about who really needs to be in the room. What length does it need to be? What is the purpose of the meeting? And making sure that all of that is clear. She even had a great patent interrupt that was if a meeting was supposed to start at 3 o'clock and finish at 4 o'clock, instead of making it 3 to 3.55, why don't you make it 3.05 through to 4 p.m.? And then you're intentionally shorting the meeting and giving you that gap, but with a lesser chance that the meeting will overrun. So remember that one better meeting can change a team's energy. It can change how they show up, how what they focus on. This is going to make a huge ripple effect in your organization if you can reset the way you approach meetings in your organization. All right, now let's go to a wider reflection about the state of leadership right now. When you zoom out across February and look at the broader state of work, a few things are clear. People are tired. Change is constant, and trust is fragile. Recent leadership research continues to reinforce the same themes. Psychological safety drives performance. And it's your responsibility as a leader to create that. Empathy improves retention and engagement because everyone wants to feel seen, heard, and valued. And clarity reduces burnout more than perks ever will. Clarity of role, clarity of responsibility, clarity of purpose, all of these things remove churn in your organization and give people clarity of what it is they're supposed to do and how will they know when they're successful. Yet today, many leaders are still rewarded for speed over reflection, busyness over impact, the badge of honor of being busy, and certainty over curiosity. February reminded us that the leaders people want to follow right now are those who lead with intention, check their impact, regulate themselves under pressure, and design environments where people can do their very best work. So let me leave you with one final reflection. If leadership is the sum of our moments, then the question becomes, what moments am I creating right now? So here's your integrated February challenge. Over the next week, lead one moment with self-awareness. Handle one situation with empathy and emotional regulation and redesign your calendar to make your meetings more intentional. You don't need to overhaul everything. You just need to be deliberate and intentional. Because leadership isn't about doing more, it's about doing what matters with awareness, care, and intention. If this episode resonated with you, share it with a leader who's trying to navigate the complexity of work right now. In our next episode, we're going to be joined by the amazing Bruce Vojak, who's has studied deeply the difference between serial innovators and those that struggle with innovation. And we're going to talk about how you can unlock innovation in your teams and in your organizations. Until then, lead with courage, lead with care, and as always, lead better. You've been listening to the Leadership Project. If today sparked an insight, don't keep it to yourself. Share it with one other person who would benefit from listening to the show. A huge thank you to Gerald Calibo for his tireless work editing every episode. And to my amazing wife Sei, who does all the heavy lifting in the background to make this show possible. None of this happens without them. Around here we believe leadership is a practice, not a position. That people should feel seen, heard, valued, and that they matter. That the best leaders trade ego for empathy, certainty for curiosity, and control for trust. If that resonates with you, please subscribe on YouTube and on your favourite podcast app. And if you want more, follow me on LinkedIn and explore our archives for conversations that move you from knowing to doing. Until next time, lead with curiosity, courage, and care.