Human Centered Leadership With MBR Principles

Blame is easy, but it’s expensive. When teams live in “they did it to me,” deadlines slip, trust erodes, and coaching turns into policing. John Wandolowski and Greg Powell get real about human-centered leadership using Dr. Durst’s Management By Responsibility (MBR) framework, starting with one shift that changes everything: moving from effect to cause by owning our response, even when we don’t like what happened. 

From there, we walk through the levels of leadership development, from unconscious and self-protective all the way to the responsible level. We talk about why psychological safety is not a feel-good perk, but the operating system that lets people admit mistakes, learn fast, and take smart risks. You’ll hear what “safe to fail” looks like in real manager behavior, and why the highest expression of leadership feels like being a conductor: building repeatable systems, developing a bench, and creating results that last after you’re gone. 

We also take on the sacred cow of performance reviews. We explain why checkbox reviews and lazy self-assessments can become counterproductive, then offer a better alternative: career reviews that center growth, goals, and ownership. We share practical coaching questions you can use immediately, how to spot blame-game language, and how to redirect toward options, support, and commitments without shaming anyone. 

If you want a leadership style that raises the bar by raising ownership, this conversation gives you a playbook. Subscribe, share with a manager or HR partner, and leave a review with the one phrase you want your team to stop saying and the one question you want leaders to start asking.

Transcript

Welcome And Why Leadership Matters

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Well, hello, and welcome to our podcast, Success, Secrets, and Stories. I'm your host, John Wondolowski, 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

Human Centered Leadership And MBR

SPEAKER_01 0:40

about a subject that I think supports that concept. Today we wanted to talk about human-centered principles of leadership. And while traditional management focuses on external controls, Greg and I like to talk about how MBR emphasizes true leadership and how it impacts people. When it occurs is when the manager acts as a facilitator for the employee's internal growth and accountability.

SPEAKER_00 1:15

So the synergies between Dr. Durst's framework and how it affects leaders

Cause Versus Effect And Blame

SPEAKER_00 1:20

really centers on the core principles of MBR's management approach. The first is cause and effect.

SPEAKER_01 1:27

Yeah, and to make it a little bit more basic, when people are always blaming others for their negative experience, as Dr. Durst would put it, blaming others only masks the symptoms of an underlying problem. The problem of unwillingness on the part of most people in management to take responsibility for their own experiences. Eliminating one of the symptoms seems simple, but it just creates another problem. When we say we don't like it, we feel angry, upset, frustrated, embarrassed, or put down. It essentially is playing life from the effect position. What I mean by that is simply they did it to me.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

And when you say I liked it, whatever it was, we play it from the cause position. I did it, I did it to me. Generally, what we acknowledge is that I worked overtime to achieve the result, or I finished the family room, or I decided on vacation for the family. When we like what is happening in our experience, we tend to take 100% responsibility for the results. We take full credit.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Yeah. And the point is you choose to take responsibility when you like it and you like the result. You deflect or try to turn off when you see that the results are not good because you don't like it. Therefore, you tend to blame others. The simple truth is we are responsible for everything in our experience, whether we like it or not. There's Dr. Durce's key words. It is not human nature to accept blame or fault for an error. Taking responsibility for what happens in your life is the key point of MBR.

SPEAKER_00 3:19

In MBR, being at effect means reacting to circumstances. Being at cause means taking ownership of one's responses. Here's the key point. It's not about changing what occurred. Rather, it's about accepting that the event happened, whether positive or negative, and owning your response to it. The distinction is the essence of whether a person is engaged in making change or simply pointing fingers.

SPEAKER_01 3:46

And, you know, Greg, that is a perfect encapsulation of what MBR really means. And I want to share one of my favorite quotes that Dr. Durst introduced from Admiral Hyman Rickover. Responsibility is a unique concept. It can only reside here in a single individual. You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You can delegate it, but it is still with you. You can disclaim it,

Leadership Levels And Safe To Fail

SPEAKER_01 4:20

but you cannot divest yourself of it. What the admiral so eloquently described was the essence of Dr. Durce's work. Take responsibility for your life. Now, if cause and effect is the foundation, the next question is how do people actually grow into taking on that kind of ownership? That's where Dr. Durce's levels of leadership really becomes a practical description of goals.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

So the second key element of MBR is understanding the levels of progression, with the highest level often described as the responsible level. What matters for leaders is a sense of psychological safety that tends to cycle through each stage. People test the environment, decide whether it's safe, and then either grow or retreat. In simplest terms, the levels move from unconscious to self-protective to conformist to achievement and finally to responsible. As leaders, we help people ascend by creating a safe-to-fail environment where mistakes are treated as information for growth. Over time, that maturity is what produces responsible leadership.

SPEAKER_01 5:40

So we're talking about human-centered kind of leadership. And at the top end of that kind of progression, leadership kind of moves into the responsible level or to what he calls the conductor's level. And I think after he had spent time teaching people about MBR, it became clear that there was just like another level of responsibility. And the highest expression is where they're building a legacy of the organization. So this conductor is basically looking beyond just simply the steps and making sure the team hits the numbers. They start to go into a process where they're building a system that keeps producing results after I'm gone. For example, you might document a process that it's repeatable, cross-train people so it isn't brittle, develop a bench in the future so that they can carry the culture and improve on those ideas.

The Conductor Level And Legacy

SPEAKER_01 6:40

At this level, this conductor's level, the most developed leaders spend a lot of their energy developing their staffs, helping people move to these levels so they become more capable leaders themselves.

SPEAKER_00 6:54

Which leads us to the third key to discuss how management deals with people problems, which are often intertwined with performance reviews. With human-centered leadership, the MBR approach replaces top-down directives with curiosity-driven coaching, asking employees how they plan to solve their challenges and reinforcing their role as a cause of the results.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

That's such an effective tool. And the third element of MBR is probably the hardest to implement. The key is understanding where you are in the leadership ladder in your own career. Are you more protective? Are you more of a conformist? It is difficult to have a conversation that requires the mentoring and coaching if you haven't developed yourself. And that's where human-centered principles start to show up. At the responsible level, you can hear the maturity of how the leader mentors and coaches

Coaching Instead Of Directives

SPEAKER_01 7:55

their staff, especially when things don't go perfectly. The core of MBR is it starts with you. As you mature, your approach and your results get better and you help make that transition. And your staff goes along in that process. One doesn't happen before the other. You need to put it in place and lead productively before you can positively influence others, especially in the format that MBR promotes.

SPEAKER_00 8:28

You know, John, I remember you discussed this before. How you labored over the performance reviews that you changed to call them career reviews, correct? Yeah. Yeah. Can you share an example

Career Reviews That Change Lives

SPEAKER_00 8:40

of a time you saw that shift land with someone where changing the conversation from performance to career actually changed the outcome? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

I always make a point of having a career review, not a performance review. And I would labor over trying to get the career reviews done and make sure that we were setting goals at the same time in every meeting with every manager. And in one of my last assignments, I was talking to a manager that I was giving one of my, you know, towards the end of my career, one of my final performance reviews that we had talked about my retirement was pending. And he mentioned that he wanted to step back and say that no one in the 20 years that he had worked with the organization and have been through all kinds of performance reviews ever centered their conversations about career. That I was the only one encouraging him to go and take classes and prepare for that next step and really believe that he could have been a director, too. He was just happy with his career and he was happy with his growth, but it was so interesting to see how he had helped the other people in his department. He took that whole career counseling, goal-setting environment and applied it to his staff. And he bragged about how people were being promoted and changing their direction in their lives, both at home and at work. And it's when you sit back and you say, Did MBR work? Oh, heck yeah, it works. And he was probably one of the best examples of why a performance review should be tossed in the waste can. And it everybody should have the opportunity to talk about a career and how they can develop the staff and their careers. And then you finally have that focus of helping people. And if you want to know what a conductor feels like in that moment in time, I felt like a conductor.

SPEAKER_00 10:48

Most performance reviews start with handing the employee the review and then asking them to fill it out first. We call that the self-assessment. It gives the employee the opportunity to give input into the process. The self-assessment also helps to jog the manager's recall of the employee's performance. While this may sound reasonable, it can also be incredibly lazy. We've seen in reviews where the manager

Reviews By Level And What To Listen For

SPEAKER_00 11:10

only fills out the bottom of the form to assess the employee's performance as it relates to the company goals, essentially saying, I concur with what they've said and is signed off on it. The whole process becomes counterproductive. The whole point of a performance review should be to engage the employee in a real conversation, not to simply check boxes and assign a performance grade after 12 months. If the employee leaves the room knowing the rating but not knowing how to grow, we miss the opportunity.

SPEAKER_01 11:38

Yeah. And when we're talking about human-centered leadership, so let's talk about the connection directly to how that experience affects a career or performance. Reviews at each level of responsibility ladder are different. And if you can recognize that different level on which that employee is operating from, you can tailor the conversation. So it builds that sense of ownership with the employee rather than the defensiveness of a review that needs to be enhanced. Like level one, the unconscious level. An indicator is the lack of awareness regarding deadlines or the impact to others. You often answer questions as far as the employee is things are happening to me. It's almost as if it was magic. Some of the self-discipline characteristics of someone who's in this category of unconscious is little self-control, or they can't sustain motivation over time.

SPEAKER_00 12:42

So level two is a self-protective level. The indicator is a victim position where they blame others for everything. Self-discipline characteristics include difficulty making decisions and relying on patterns or data from the past. Now, level three is the conformist level. The indicator here in performance reviews is the need to meet the standards of the job description. Self-discipline characteristics include the need for clear, written instructions and a lack of flexibility or creativity.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

And employees that are at the achievement level, an indicator of their performance is things like highly competitive or always seeking the approval of others. A characteristic in terms of self-discipline would be high anxiety and having challenges in terms of creating plans or developing for future plans. Levels five and six are very similar. They're at technically the same level, and it's the core of the responsible level, an indicator of people who are at this level taking responsibility for the results. And they're not working within a silo, they work within a team. Self-discipline characteristics include good planning, good organizing, and are able to implement directives. The highest expression of the responsible level is that enhancement or the conductor-like quality of a fully developed leader. The conductor, still a level five description, is interested in helping others succeed and serves as a strong mentor, teacher, and a coach in the workplace. So let's step back and talk about how these levels of human-centered leadership really affect the bottom line. In essence, the core issue is

Psychological Safety And Radical Responsibility

SPEAKER_01 14:40

psychological safety. That's what you're trying to build by developing people in these different levels. Shifting from a punishment-oriented performance review to an empowering format, a career development format. So I know you're asking, how do you accomplish that through MBR?

SPEAKER_00 15:02

Well, John, the first thing you're trying to address is the blame game. MBR creates a safe space for people to admit, I made a mistake without fearing they're going to be shamed for it. When employees feel they can be honest, they stop hiding errors and start learning from those errors. And that's what's where creativity comes back into the room. Risk taking becomes acceptable when an employee is engaged in taking responsibility for the results, including the cleanup when something doesn't work. And the risk isn't only to the employee, leadership has to share both the accolades and the criticism with the same steady professional approach. For example, instead of how could you let this happen? The conversation becomes something like, what happened? What did you learn? What will you do differently the next time?

SPEAKER_01 15:51

Yeah, and it's how you ask those questions. You're trying to engage the team, the member, the individual to take that next step, own it, have some sense of ownership. And it also like pushes them to be creative. Another effect of MBR is moving past the need to promote yourself, to be the perfect employee. It's recognizing individual growth, becoming more effective, and being able to handle setbacks. Lessons in terms of failures and success are all shared learning. So the organization can build on the experience and avoid repeating problems that arise.

SPEAKER_00 16:33

So, more from an HR perspective, listen closely to the language people use during career reviews. The blame game phrases show up very quickly. Hey, they didn't get me the info in time. I couldn't do it because of Sally. Or it's just not fair. I've only been here six months. Then gently move the conversation towards the employee where they can take control. Given what happened, what are your options? What support do you need? And what will you own between now and our next check-in? That starts to shift and helps the individual understand the importance of taking ownership of their results and it creates a path forward.

SPEAKER_01 17:13

You know, and another thing is how important near misses are. If something failed and somebody caught it early, you're seeing proactive ownership, and that deserves a lot of recognition. Not just praising people for avoiding a failure, you're praising for the ability to take responsibility on the surface and fixing it and promoting it and trying to pull the team in and seeing how the results actually affect other people. This is how you create that safety net for people. People learn that they can trust you, that your intent is to help. And it's not going to be perfect. Over time, you'll hear different conversations and career reviews that are explaining how problems and problem solving happen. But if they're missing a deadline and they're trying to tell you here is why, what they're talking about is whether they're a stakeholder and they're meeting those expectations. They're in a new place. They're taking ownership. And if you have that as a strong baseline, you can build a better career and they have a higher trajectory because they take that ownership.

SPEAKER_00 18:26

You know, John, in addition, one of the other terms I find very interesting when we describe Dr. Durst's approach to the responsible level is fostering a high performance culture by moving individuals toward a mindset of radical self-responsibility. I think it's only radical because the environment we have today, where people don't want to take responsibility. They're afraid to take responsibility. But as we've discussed, you're trying to develop your staff to see the benefits of being at cause for change in their careers rather than sitting there as victims in their own jobs. Right.

SPEAKER_01 18:59

So currently, MBR's approach to human leadership still defines a leader as a facilitator and a mature leader. Rather than just managing tasks, a leader is helping the employee to shift from a reactive mindset to be proactive. And that whole idea about being the cause for the results is the essence of what you're trying to teach. That shift isn't motivational stuff. It shows up in everyday choices, how people talk about their work, talk to each other, and how quickly they recover from something that goes wrong. It prioritizes psychological safety by separating blame from responsibility and treating errors as data to grow from rather than causes for punishment. It fosters that term of radical self-responsibility. Leaders empower individuals to become authors of their future. Ensuring high performance is sustainable, the byproduct of personal development is collective trust.

SPEAKER_00 20:08

So if we boil this down for the listeners, it's not be nicer. And it's certainly not lower the bar. It's raise ownership by raising safety. When people aren't spending energy protecting themselves, they can actually spit it improving the work. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 20:27

And here's just a few practical ways to try to capsulize this MBR process. If people are living life through the effect it's being done to them, until they can understand that sense of ownership, they're never going to be able to progress.

Practical Signals And Closing Links

SPEAKER_01 20:46

When you're doing the process the right way and they're taking responsibility for what is happening in their lives, they'll hear sentences like, I know how I can avoid doing this in the future. Well, if you start hearing people taking ownership, that's the essence of what we're trying to talk about. If they're talking about obstacles and things that are stopping them from being productive, and in the same conversation, talk about how to get around those obstacles and how to take responsibility for the end result, that's what you're trying to coach. MBR is a wonderful program, but it is developing trust over time. And when you have the opportunity to try to put this process in and fully develop it, it really does work. So if you like what you've heard, 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, More about Dr. Durst, you can find out on SuccessGrowth Academy.com. And if you'd like to contact us, please send me a line. That's Wando75 periodjw at gmail.com. 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. It has always helped us to create content. Thanks, Greg. This is fun. Thanks, John. As always. Next time. Yeah.