Success Secrets and Stories
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Success Secrets and Stories
Interview w/ Will Samson, Radical Self-Ownership: How Great Leaders Empower Others to Shine
John introduces Will Sampson, Coach and Author. Will discusses challenges of conventional leadership wisdom, revealing why great leaders succeed not through control but by empowering others to shine. Drawing from his experience as a former director of change for a 53,000-person organization leading a $12 billion merger, Sampson shares how his personal journey through addiction recovery transformed his understanding of leadership resilience.
The conversation explores Sampson's groundbreaking "Resilience Stack" methodology—a five-layer approach to building leadership from the inside out. Starting with rewriting internal narratives, he guides leaders through radical self-ownership, interdependence, systems for growth, and finally, leading from an internally transformed state. This approach stands in stark contrast to the "hack culture" promising quick fixes that Sampson's research with 200 C-level executives revealed as deeply unsatisfying.
Particularly compelling is Sampson's perspective on leadership potential across all age groups. Rejecting the narrative that innovation belongs only to the young, he shares how his own professional reinvention in his mid-50s taught him that meaningful contribution can happen at any life stage. "Walk out to your driveway, get in your car, put your hands on the steering wheel—where do you want to go?" This thought experiment helps his clients recognize they still have agency and purpose, regardless of age.
The discussion also tackles AI anxiety, with Sampson offering a calming perspective based on his two decades of experience with neural networks. Rather than seeing technology as threatening, he encourages leaders to view it as simply another tool humans have invented—one that creates extraordinary new possibilities for those willing to embrace it with creativity rather than fear.
Whether you're leading a team through technological transformation, seeking greater resilience in your leadership approach, or contemplating your next professional chapter, Sampson's insights offer a refreshing alternative to conventional leadership development. Follow his work at willsampson.co to learn more about his upcoming book, "The Resilience Stack," and leadership programs.
Presented by John Wandolowski and Greg Powell
Well, hello and welcome to our podcast, success Secrets and Stories. I'm your host, john Wondoloski, and I'm here with my co-host and friend, greg Powell. Greg, hey, everybody. And when we put together this podcast, we wanted to put out a helping hand and help that next generation and help answer the question of what does it mean to be a leader? Today we want to talk about a subject that I think supports that concept. Well, welcome. This is Success Secrets and Stories special program called Stories. Author to Author. I'm your host, john Wondoloski, and we get a chance to discuss with the author their motivations, their approach to writing a book and subjects that are near and dear to their hearts. Today, I'd like to introduce Will Sampson, and I should say Dr Sampson, what is your preference?
Speaker 2:Will is fine.
Speaker 1:Will is fine, Awesome Will. I've seen some very interesting posts on LinkedIn and one of them that kind of caught my eye what great leaders know and what good ones don't know. Why don't we talk about a little bit about what you were going through, your the 15 components of of that post and what you were trying to get across?
Speaker 2:yeah, what I find, certainly in my own life and in my own experience as I work with leaders, is that so often there's this idea that we need to be in complete control. There's a command and control idea that still dominates leadership in the way we do it, particularly in America and the West, but not exclusively, but not exclusively, and what I was really hoping to get out, the idea I was really hoping to move forward in that great leaders the 15 things that great leaders do post was really that great leaders allow others to shine, so they give credit early, they listen with the intention to understand, they ask for help before everything starts to fall apart. We have this idea in our culture of this sort of perfect individual who is able to do everything themselves, and they just that human doesn't exist. I mean, take a. The example I often give is of Steve Jobs.
Speaker 2:Steve Jobs we think of as this most successful entrepreneur, and yet he was really struggling before he met Tim Cook, and Tim Cook came along and provided operational excellence that enabled jobs to ship product, which included initially upgrades to the Mac and the iMac, but then the iPhone and all that, and so what I was hoping to do in that post is really establish that great leaders are not great themselves. Great leaders are those who are able to develop others, to listen to others, and oftentimes they're able to do that because they have taken control of their own lives. I call it radical self-ownership. It's a big part of my coaching methodology. But great leaders are able to be great not because they can force other people or bend other people to their will, but because they're able to bring other people into the journey that they're guiding them on.
Speaker 1:And maybe we can talk a little bit about what you're doing now, because you're doing consulting, you're doing leadership seminars and you're also working on another book and I think all of those kind of intertwine. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what you're doing now.
Speaker 2:So I worked for a number of years. So I'm a kind of a strange mix. I have a master's inations, but what I keep coming back to is the fact that it is the successful leader that is able to really bring about the change. So when I started as a technologist and I'm going back several decades now technology was the barrier. It was difficult to build the technology to do the things we wanted to do. Now, not just with AI, but certainly with a variety of disruptive technologies, technology is not the issue anymore, so it really does end up focusing very heavily on the leader and what I.
Speaker 2:What I kept finding and this was similar to my own experience finding, and this was similar to my own experience was that leaders lacked the resilience to lead, and it mirrored my own story. I was kind of at the top of my game. I was the director of change for a 53,000 person organization, leading a $12 billion merger and miserable. I couldn't imagine continuing to do that. I understand, and I walked away from that. Yeah, and there were some other things that were going on.
Speaker 2:I also part of my story is moving through the recovery process addiction recovery process so I had to deal with some of that as well. But in that journey, what I learned is that it is it is the resilience of the leader that actually gives that person the ability to lead. It's not having all these tricks or these hacks or whatever you know five quick ways to this or 10 easy steps to that. In fact, it's when the leader, um first of all owns their own story, their own narrative, then they're quite happy to let other people succeed in their areas of excellence as well. I call them green lights, but green lights are those things that, like we know we're good at, other people have told us we're good at, but we also get a lot of energy from doing, and I find it is that resilient leader who is taking radical self-ownership that can let other people thrive as well.
Speaker 1:And I think you know pressure and some of the jobs that I've had not at the same level, but pressure isn't unique to that level or that assignment, it's pretty universal. But that element of self-awareness and that element of being able to sometimes pray or meditate or take time for yourself, maybe you can speak a little bit about that, because I think it's leading up to some of the things that you have been talking about recently.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yes. And again, one of the greatest teachers in my life has been addiction, and one of the greatest teachers in my life has been addiction, because what you find in that process is you have so much control and there's a lot of things over which you don't have control. In the midst of my journey, I picked up a book by Viktor Frankl. It's called Man's Search for Meaning, and he says that the greatest human freedom, the one that can never be taken away from us, is the freedom to choose our own attitude in any given situation, and what I realized was that we are never victims of what other people have done.
Speaker 2:Most of that relates to what story are we going to tell about that? And also, do we believe in the goodness of the universe? And for you, that may be a belief in God, it may be a belief in some other higher power? Um, when I'm willing to believe, um, in the goodness of myself and the goodness of others, and in the belief that the world was aligned for my goodness, that the world was waiting for me to help contribute, uh, to the, to the future of a better planet, when I, when I came to believe that then I was able to grow myself and also to grow others and grow a team around me of people who believe that.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. So your company right now is developed so that you can help corporate as well as teams and you're doing lectures. Maybe you can talk a little bit about your organization and how it's been crafted to help other people yeah.
Speaker 2:So everything we do is around this idea of resilience. And uh, just a little nerd alert, because I was a former software developer I call my methodology a resilience stack. So you know, we write software in stacks and in the same way, I think, we rewrite our internal operating system in stacks. And this is really the basis for everything we do. It's the basis for our coaching, it's the basis for the learning labs that I hold, it's the basis for the courses that I'm putting out and the book that I'm getting ready to finish before the year is out.
Speaker 2:And it follows along five basic steps. One is owning our own internal narrative. You know, we in recovery, a lot of times we use the. Remember the old movie metaphor the caller is inside the house, like you're worried, like where's the, where's the danger coming from? And it's the, it's the bad guy on the upstairs extension. And so often the executives I work with they're trying to figure out where the problem is outside of them and they don't begin by asking what stories am I telling myself?
Speaker 2:So layer one is sort of rewriting our internal narratives. Layer two is radical self ownership. You could call it management by responsibility, but it's that idea that I am in charge of everything I'm in charge of. Yes, there are many things that I can't control, there are things that I expect others to do if they're on my team or part of my effort, but I'm in charge of me and it's that idea of I call it radical self-ownership, because it really goes down to the root of who we are.
Speaker 2:Layer three allows us to lean into interdependence, to begin to understand that everybody else is just like us, trying to figure out what their purpose is, how they succeed in the world. And then layer four is to begin to build a system for ongoing growth and then finally to figure out how to lead from that internally changed state outward. Rather than trying to lead by management, by tricks or techniques, it's really management by internal transformation, and that's the basis of the work that we do with teams, it's the basis of the work that I do with individual C-level executives and entrepreneurs, and it's the basis of the course and the book that we're putting out.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. That's awesome. I think the other part that I found in the little bit that I've been doing in terms of coaching is, as a leader, you're leading people. Now it isn't the technology, it isn't the mechanics of what you're doing and how you're being perceived and what you do to keep current and to be relevant All those things that the ability of self-awareness starts to kick in. That I think, really I think the biggest challenge for somebody who's new is to understand that step away from being a technocrat Right and how to step back now and to be responsible for other people and to develop your replacement, which is one of the interesting things for the kind of operational jobs that I've been in, if I don't have a person that can take my place, I'm never going to get promoted. Putting that two cents into what does leadership really mean? How are you applying it? How are you applying it?
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, very much. So I totally agree with that sentiment and I think it's also true that we have to recognize the moment we're in. So there's a couple forces. One is what we sometimes talk about as demographic winter. So just humanly, we made more baby boomers than we made Gen Xers, no-transcript. So we have to recognize that nurturing people and growing them into leadership positions is critical. And then, on the sort of the other end, demographically or generationally, are the younger individuals entering the workforce who have zero desire to be in management because they've seen all of the problems with it, all of the problems with it and we're seeing.
Speaker 2:You know, it's difficult to recruit and retain really great workers, and that's true in the tech industry, but it's true across the board. Cost of money is going up. I mean there's all these kind of leadership challenges that are sort of outside of the leader. And what I found in my own experience, what I have found in my coaching, what I have found in the successful leaders I've worked with, is that they're able to manage the things outside of them when they can successfully manage the things inside of them, when they're able to manage those internal narratives and take a really a radical sense of self-ownership, take a complete responsibility for themselves and what they're leading in the world.
Speaker 1:That is so much to the point that you're writing the book about it, right. And that is dead center to what I think really makes a difference to people in terms of understanding that they've taken on that responsibility and also, if they're short in terms of skill sets or background or exposure or conversations with their staff, they have to do that correction, they have to engage Precisely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and there are no shortcuts, and this is another thing. So we just got done. We interviewed 200 C-level executives and we asked them about their resilience and how they practice resilience in their work. And one theme that we were surprised at and it's something I'm getting ready to be writing about more over the next weeks and months is that they're really disillusioned with the sort of hack culture or the idea that there's some quick, easy fix to these problems.
Speaker 1:So true.
Speaker 2:You know right now you want to sell. If you want to sell content on the internet, promise somebody that it's quick or easy or painless and the reality is great. Leadership, personal growth none of those things. They are none of those things right. And so really encouraging people to lean into the longer term work of internal transformation, radical self-ownership and interdependence, I think is absolutely critical.
Speaker 1:So true. The other post that I thought was interesting is cheat codes I wish I knew at 55, which I thought that was pretty funny because you're looking.
Speaker 2:So us baby boomers and I'm guilty of that category Right so us baby boomers and I'm guilty of that category and just somebody else reading it in their 20s or 30s going, no, it can't relate to me. Oh, yes, it does, and we need to talk about a little bit about that, because I thought there was some pearls of wisdom. That was a fun post, and again, it came out of my own experience. So if you want an interesting thought exercise, just open up a search engine and search for entrepreneurs or executives who succeeded later in life, and what you'll find is Colonel Sanders, ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald's, and then a bunch of 30-year-olds and my own, which is hardly later in life, right, exactly, yeah. And so my own personal experience, john, is that I experienced I related to you earlier I was well, I was 54, but I was almost 55 at the time and and I really had to kind of go deep at that point and say, okay, what you know? What am I supposed to be learning? What are some of the cheat codes that I think are true here? Because we so often think like we, we've got these.
Speaker 2:We still live with these stratified generational ideas, like 55 is when you're starting to move toward retirement and you know 60, you're looking for the home on the golf course and by 65, you're out of the game game, um, I'm thankful that I didn't have that, only that experience in my own family situation. So when my dad was, he was 62 years old he and my mom sold everything they had and they moved to africa to do wow, to do ngo type work, and so I this, I like I've got this sort of programming in my brain that says no, you know, 60 is not that old, 65 is not even that old. And because we know people are going to be living longer, I really wanted to encourage people to think more broadly about, um, what we have to contribute, um, because, again, even having made it to the end of an executive life so maybe you're in your sixties, uh, you know or late fifties, early sixties, um, there's still a ton of possibility and a ton of work to be done. I think one of the most exciting opportunities is the opportunity for entrepreneurship around some of these significant problems that we just haven't figured out a way to solve. And it is those of us with a little more experience that are really able to imagine what those ways we could solve some of those problems.
Speaker 2:And I, like you, were talking before, before we started the podcast, you were talking about the idea of being on the bus, like, are you the driver of the bus or are you later on the bus? And I love that because it's actually a metaphor I use with a lot of my coaching clients. So I will ask, I'll do a thought experiment with my coaching client and I say, okay, imagine I want you to walk out to your driveway in your imagination. Walk out your driveway, get in your car. Now your hands are on the steering steering wheel. Where do you want to go? Where are you going to go? And they'll say, well, I don't know. Okay, great, so now we know. Now we know where we want to start, because the reality is we can go anywhere and with you know, longer life, longer life expectancy, greater health, other other kinds of tools, like we can imagine we're going to live longer. So maybe you were late 50s, 60s, maybe even early 70s. You're still behind the steering wheel. Where do you want to drive?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think the other part that you brought up that was very interesting is a concept that I learned a little bit about satisfaction. When do you have enough? When is enough actually accomplished? What is the magic number? I already know the number doesn't exist because billionaires still want more and some of the happiest people I know worked with me in the facilities world and the facilities. People aren't really making a ton of cash, but there's that element of life and love and accomplishment and satisfaction and maybe you could talk a little bit about that and especially how that relates to the things that you've learned, where you found peace in that process.
Speaker 2:You bet, yeah, and you're right, I have written about enough. Actually, I wrote a book with that name. It was a number of years ago, right, but what I learned in the process of recovery, what I've learned over the last several years because the other thing was I started my business, I had the genius idea to start my business in early 2020. And so I'm I'm just getting going. When COVID hits, the whole world is shutting down. And, um, what I learned?
Speaker 2:Again, this goes back to those internal narratives, these stories. We tell ourselves that if I am looking for a measurement of enough by somebody else's metric, so maybe that's Instagram impressions, maybe it's sales, maybe it's the prestige of my client base. You know, there's, there's a whole thing, right, if things, what I'm, what I continue to be struck by, is that, in some ways, that's its own form of addiction. You know, those of us who have gone through recovery, yes, realize that are. The greatest lie we told ourselves was the belief that we needed something from outside of ourselves to come inside of ourselves in order to be happy, healthy, whole, whatever.
Speaker 2:That is right, and the same is true for the next big deal, for a hedge fund billionaire, the same is true for a content creator trying to create content on Instagram or LinkedIn. It's, it's that idea that we need something from outside of us in order to find contentment, wholeness and uh, and even a sense of healing, like even in in terms of our own trauma. Oftentimes we're um. I'm a big believer in internal family systems therapy, if you're familiar with that model. It's the idea that we have to say, okay, out of those desires, what can I actually begin to accomplish and create in the world in a very concrete way and in a way that makes for a better future for my grandchildren and beyond grandchildren?
Speaker 1:and beyond, and so much of the fears right now and I know that's one of the things that I was intrigued when I was looking at your background. The monster that is out there right now is AI and your experience and and the knowledge. I'm sure you're talking people off the edge because it's it's it's the fear of the unknown, but the reality is that humans are still involved in the process in order to steer the ship, but maybe you could talk a little bit about what you have done and how you're setting people up for this next generation of what computers can do.
Speaker 2:You bet yeah, and I was fortunate because I did my IT graduate work in the early 2000s we were talking a lot about neural networks and so I've been involved in AI really since almost I wouldn't say since the beginning, but, for you know, for about two decades now and a lot of what I get to do with clients. In fact, we're working with a large law firm in the Middle East right now and we have people on the team who are able to do the technology enablement and all that. And I don't do as much of that anymore, because most of what I do is help them tell a better story about a tool like AI, because the story we say is that's going to disrupt everything, it's going to make everything difficult, it's going to make people redundant and so on. But like every other technology that we humans have invented, going all the way back to, you know, fire and the wheel, it's just. It's just a technology, right? And the question is how will we use it? Will we use it to grow ourselves? Will we use it to make the world a better place? Or will we use it to enrich ourselves and, you know, be kind of selfish in our resources and, and those are. Those are things that, over time, we've seen be done with all of the technologies we've invented. So, in some ways, we're just um, we're just in a, we're just in a new technology era.
Speaker 2:I will say, though, there's a, there's a kind of a bigger thing happening, which is that, um, and there's a historian who said that we basically, as humans, we kind of reinvent ourselves about every 500 years, and we're also kind of in that time as well. So I think what that gives us is what it should give us is a greater sense of agency is possible now than was ever possible before. We can have the attitude of fearfulness and be afraid of that possibility, or we can practice agency and say, wow, imagine what we could do now. Imagine what, like, what could we actually create? I'm working with a team in the research triangle area who is there are three people who fully anticipate being the first tech unicorn, or a you know billion dollar valuation with no more than no more than 10 employees, and that's what ai is making possible.
Speaker 2:And so when, when we look at a lot of companies, particularly that have been either late to the game in terms of adoption of AI or they're just, they're not typically disruptive um industries like, like legal or healthcare or so on. Um, there's just tons of possibilities, and and the question is not, can we, can we make the technology match the need? The question is, can we? Um tell a story that allows us to do that? That's really what matters, and so I do. I get to hold the hands of a lot of leaders.
Speaker 1:Come up off the edge. You're okay, you're okay.
Speaker 2:Exactly, Exactly, and thankfully you know my background as a coach and even to a degree with all of the other ways I've counseled people through some of their struggles in their life. Like I, get to practice that in the corporate space as well.
Speaker 1:No, that's awesome. We're getting close to the end of our interview. I wanted to ask a couple questions specifically. I like the idea of your book. Your the book that you're working on. I know it's a working title, so you know they have to keep their eyes open for Will Sampson's next book. The working title is what again?
Speaker 2:Is the Resilience Stack? Okay? Perfect, A five-layer process for building resilience from the inside out.
Speaker 1:And as an author, just out of curiosity, a book, maybe two books that you've read recently, that you were intrigued by.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow. For anybody watching this on video, you'll see just one of my bookshelves behind me, and probably one of the great books I've read lately is by somebody that I happen to have the pleasure of knowing. His name is Brad Stuhlberg and it's called Masters of Change. It's a very, very powerful book because I've done so much work in in change and change management and personal change, personal development. I tend to read a lot of those books, um, but I do think any really anything you can get your hands on by Brad Stuhlberg is a great read right now.
Speaker 1:Okay, um, so we're close to the end. Is there contact information that people can learn more about Learning Labs there?
Speaker 2:You can sign up for my newsletter and you can also follow just all the content that we're putting out. I do a sub stack every week, so every week I put out one large sub stack article and then two smaller ones. We're doing our own podcast. So we're really trying to create content in a variety of channels right now, but they all relate to this primary concept, which is that when leaders are willing to work on internal resilience and rewrite their internal narratives and take radical self-ownership, that the possibilities are, they haven't even imagined the possibilities when they're willing to do that work. And that's really the basis.
Speaker 2:Everything we're putting out is around that, including the learning labs. So we do a half day and one day seminars for executive teams, organizations. We call them learning labs because that's really the model. I mean, I'm an educator as well, and so the idea of of me standing in front of people and just talking at them for four hours sounds sounds as terrible to me as it would to them, and so we really what we try to do is in is engage leaders in um. You know, we try to create a series of engaging exercises that really help them move toward that place of resilience and self-ownership.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. So that kind of wraps up our episode of Stories Author to Author. Thank you, will, for all your insight. I wish you the best with the book. Thank you, so. I hope this helped in terms of diving into the creative process of writing a book and the things that Will has been working on. I hope to talk to you someday about the efforts on you telling your story. So until next time, keep reading, keep writing and keep sharing those stories. See you soon.
Speaker 1:I've written a book called Building your Leadership Toolbox and we talk about tools like this, and it's available on Amazon and Barnes, noble and other sites. The podcast is what you've been listening to. Thank you so much. It's also available on Apple, google and Spotify. A lot of what we talk about is from Dr Durst and his MBR program. If you'd like to know more about Dr Durst, you can find out on successgrowthacademycom and if you'd like to contact us, please send me a line. That's wando75.jw at gmailcom. And the music has been brought to you by my grandson, so we want to hear from you. Drop me a line, tell me what's going on, what you like and what you would like to hear about, and it's always helped us to create content. Thanks, greg, this was fun.
Speaker 2:Thanks.
Speaker 1:John, as always, next time yeah.