The Leadership DNA Nobody Talks About

Are great leaders born, or are they developed over time?

In this thought-provoking episode of APEX Performance Podcast, Dr. Anthony Simmons explores one of the most debated questions in leadership: the difference between leaders and managers. Drawing from decades of military leadership, executive experience, coaching, and organizational development, Dr. Simmons explains why leadership is ultimately about inspiring people, building trust, developing future leaders, and creating environments where individuals can thrive.

You'll discover how leaders empower people while managers focus on systems, why delegation is essential to preventing burnout, how trust and emotional intelligence influence performance, and why the best leaders meet people where they are. Dr. Simmons also discusses the role of artificial intelligence in leadership, the importance of servant leadership, developing leadership depth, and creating cultures built on accountability, confidence, and growth.

Whether you're a business leader, manager, executive, coach, entrepreneur, educator, or aspiring leader, this episode offers practical insights on building influence, developing people, leading through relationships, and creating lasting impact.

Because leadership is not about controlling people. It's about inspiring them to become more than they believed possible.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Do you ever feel like you're doing all the right things, but success still doesn't last? If you're struggling with trust, strange relationships or performance that feels harder than it should, then this podcast is for you. Here's your host, executive leader, and scholar practitioner, Dr. Anthony Simmons.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

Greetings, everyone. I am Dr. Anthony Simmons, and I am so honored and excited to welcome you to another episode of Apex Performance Podcast, where all pathways are cemented in authentic relationships through a common act. We must show appreciation, we must continue to communicate, and there must always be trust. Now, while I continue to offer accelerated pathways to excellence, today's episode will highlight leaders and managers. Leaders always, managers as appropriate. I will approach this subject from the forever-lingering question: are leaders born or are they made? And how do they differ from managers? The leadership episodes will be delivered in a build series starting with today's episode of discerning between leaders and managers. Then I will move to the most pressing leadership issues in today's time, which I call upside down leadership, where I feel leaders are standing on the top of their constituents. Then I will go into servantship, which is transcendent leadership, where the purpose goes beyond the oneself. And finally, I will talk about being out front, what we term the on-seen leader in the Navy, where we are practicing leadership in pressurized environments. Let's get moving into this leaders and managers episode. I'm gonna start with a question that I know men are not going to like. Neither will they agree with my hypothesis. Are leaders naturally born and enhanced, or are they made and refined? Now, this question can be provocative and penetrating, especially for those who are less comfortable with their leadership progress, as they may be offended if I would say that leaders are born. Also, the question could be considered rhetorical. So to avoid condemning or alienating anyone, I would just bridge the question and I will suggest that great leaders have an innate it factor. They know how to make others feel seen, heard, and understood on purpose. They can shift the energy in the room. While managers, people with leadership attributes are made. So good leaders can be made, and extraordinary leaders have a natural gift, which I like to call that DNA, that empathy gene that discriminates them from others. You manage things, you lead people. We're at my Grace Hopper, a computer pioneer. Leaders empower their people while managers empower their systems and processes. Anthony Simmons. Leaders scale their engagement level to reach people while managers operate in fixed spaces bound by their systems. Now, in today's time, I have to address leaders, managers, and artificial intelligence. My take there is leaders use AI to accelerate and bolster decisions while managers use AI to underscore their decisions. I would go on to say that leaders cross the T's and dot the I's with AI while managers replace the T's and the I's with AI. Now, as in every episode, I'd like to talk a little about my bona fideas. What's my background? What really makes me qualified to really share this subject? I feel leadership is so much of who you are and what you stand for rather than something you learn to do. It's your ability to fire people up, you know, to really take them to another level. And as I look through my three angles of coaching DNA, my innate leadership abilities, and also my efforts as a scholar practitioner, albeit today will be more about the practical aspect of leadership, my boots on the ground, what I have experienced during those times. However, from an experience perspective, I like to credit the Navy for the plethora of leadership courses and seminars that I had the pleasure to attend throughout my Navy career. Starting with my basic leadership course at the outset of being a junior officer and then moving into the intermediate level leadership and then a few executive leadership courses during my multiple times in command. And lastly, I like to credit the capstone leadership course I had at the executive level at the Navy postgraduate school. Alright, as far as being a natural leader, for some reason I could just recall going back to my years as a Pop Warner football player where I played quarterback and also as a basketball player during my middle school years, I was always a point guard, which is a leadership position. So maybe that says something about, you know, what my natural inclination was. But without further ado, I like to think that being a Navy Service Welfare officer where I was placed in leadership positions at a young age, you know, taking the hand over warship at 23 years old and understanding the responsibilities that came with that, as well as having the opportunity to manage systems, processes, and lead people. It helped me to understand the difference between managing and leading, and I can also identify and appreciate the personal attributes that's required of a leader. So you couple that with visiting over 65 countries doing partnership building and team building, it just really helps me come full circuit and able to talk about leaders and managers. President John Quincy Adams said if your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, and do more and become more, then you are a leader. So what makes a true leader and what's the difference between a leader and a manager? I like to feel that leaders are agile, lifelong learners who foster environments of trust and inspire. They make sacrifice their ally. They meet aspiring leaders where they are. They're comfortable delegating, they believe in a people's first, system next approach. They're transparent and they're self-aware. And the leader will step forward to take blame and they will accept criticism and display and unquenching thirst for feedback. They're always aiming to get better, and they have a commitment to making others better. They just have this humility about them where they see it as an actionable requirement, vice or state of being. Now, conversely, managers are more system and process driven. They have a tendency to seek credit more so than taking ownership of problematic matters. Now let's talk about peoples and systems. I feel that leaders inspire people and they solve problems. They identify what is broken and they're determined to do whatever it takes to make it better. Where managers have a tendency to institute and promote systems and have an inclination to shape people into their systems. They seek out those who make their systems better. And managers also boast about what works and they like to talk about how it made them successful. Now we're in a world today where there's a lot of challenges with burnout, you know, from our leaders and our workforce in general. And as I look at this challenge that we're in, I think that it has something to do with not having the capacity to delegate, which I earlier, you know, commented on as being one of the great attributes of a leader. As great leaders, they don't experience burnout in that regard because they develop deep benches for leadership in depth, what I talked about earlier in my Commanded C episode. They lead through people. You know, their approach is not relegated to academic concepts, it's more actionable. It's their modus operandi. You know, they operationalize what are called the five practices of exemplary leadership that's also highlighted earlier. You know, they encourage other people's heart, they empower others to act, they allow people to challenge the process, they encourage and welcome feedback so they can improve amongst their platform. They like to model the way by leading by example, and they inspire a shared vision by leading through other people. And more importantly, they are self-transcendent. They envision a purpose beyond themselves that allows them to further to develop and develop new leaders of the same mode. And that's what I talk about in Six Gear Consulting. I teach leaders to develop new leaders as leadership, sustainability, and development are connected in so many regards. And I was reading Fast Company where they said delegation enables scaling, and when you truly delegate, people will exceed beyond expectations. And lastly, John Maxwell suggests a leader's greatest return is developing new leaders. Not one of my favorite and most exciting attributes about an extraordinary leader is their ability to meet people where they are. I talk about this in details in my book, Championing Organizational Wellness, where through a coaching conversation, leaders are able to connect with people on their terms and to better understand their situations. And they are able to adjust the parameters of their leadership model to embrace and also to build on aspiring leaders' strengths. They create ways to accommodate these leaders. Bottom line, great leaders, they venture beyond their comfort zones to meet aspiring leaders where they are. While managers have a tendency to be confined within their comfort zones, they have a fixed space to operate. As I move forward, I talked about trusting inspire as a neo model, you know, for leadership culture of today, vice the old traditional hierarchy, command and control model. So where leaders are now in an environment where they do more transformational activities, where they're doing, they're connecting with people through intrinsic methods, they inspiring people, they breathing life into people vice the old model of being more carrot and stick, quit pro-quo-like, where they're more transactional and the motivational theories that it's not as authentic in today's time where we are more into trust and expire relationships of co-equals. As we move forward, say authentic relationships really is more about self-confidence, more so than personal competence. You know, leaders have to exude this self-confidence in order to stay away from those transactional methods. They have to be okay with being vulnerable and transparent about their weaknesses, as sustainable leadership often has, you know, less to do with competency alone and more to do with the level of awareness. You know, I think about when you go through these interviews, you know, this old question of asking people to identify their weaknesses. I think we're in a time now where a better question would be: are you okay being vulnerable? And what are some of your vulnerabilities? As great leaders, they share information indiscriminately, they encourage perpetual team building, and they don't pit members against you know each other through comparisons because that undermines confidence. They're more seen as engaging. As a commander, I always felt it was really important to walk around, get to know people in their space, and I talk about that in great detail in my Commandant C episode and just gave some good examples or thereof. As I look into what are some of the key competencies of a leader, and it really is just being confident, you know. Confident leaders, they are creative and innovative, they're really not risk-adverse, you know. They see the glass as half full, they understand risks and reward are really proportional in so many regards. So, because big reward equals, you know, it's going to have a high risk factor associated with it. So we have to learn how to manage those risks because anything is worthwhile because it's going to have a risk. As I moved through the military ranks and I became more senior, it just eventually occurred to me as a senior officer, I hypothesized that senior leaders they get paid to manage risk and also to help their constituents overcome these challenges and these risks. Ultimately, they must exhibit the confidence, you know, in the processes and the action required to execute these processes while encouraging their understudies to, you know, to not feel risks. They build relationships through accountability and trust, and it has to be bidirectional, meaning that, you know, leaders have to be held accountable like they hold other people accountable. And then the trust perspective has to be two ways as well. You know, it's just as important for leaders to trust their constituents and just for the constituents to trust their leaders. So we have to have that bidirectional relationship with accountability and trust in order to extract greatness from people, in order to keep them honest. And also we have to allow them to empower them to hold ourselves as leaders to account. So leaders just have what I call emotional intelligence, adeptness, and stamina. You know, they look at personal and social intelligence as if they're one competence. You know, they can integrate, you know, the personal and social attributes. You know, not only are they self-aware, but they are also able to self-manage by making the requisite adjustments to become better leaders. They are able to adapt to situations that they glean through social awareness in order to improve the relationship management, you know, the social interaction piece. So, as Eleanor Roosevelt said, a good leader inspires people to have confidence in the leader, and a great leader inspires people to have confidence in themselves. Now, let's just share a couple stories here. One I find is really fascinating. It was just yesterday I was listening to Chris Carter on a video. He was talking to some coaches. And first, he said, You guys not gonna like this conversation because it's not gonna come across, you know, with you know, the message and you thought you were going to get from me. I'm gonna tell you guys the importance of being accountable. And really he was talking about meeting people where they are, which I always tie that into the empathy gene. That's your enabler. So, what he was talking was that he coached high school football for quite some time at St. Thomas Aquinas down in Florida. And the key was he expanded on if you want to coach, you really have to be, you know, in it for the best interest, you know, of the players. You got to be willing to do what's necessary to meet them on their terms. And you have to be passionate about it and be willing to do what it takes. Like, for instance, he had to continuously attend coaching clinics in order to learn how to meet, you know, the high school players at their level. As he said, what he learned in college and NFL didn't apply to the high school level. So he had to go back and, you know, train himself and learn and get better so he can reach them at their state there. So this is what it's all about, you know, connecting new people. You know, you have to go into their space in order to connect with them where they are. It required him to self-scout and to see his position from their vantage point. He was able to do that, you know, through empathy. Then I like to talk about another aspect that I've experienced when I would go and speak to high school principals, and I would just watch the kids get off the bus in the morning time, and I would say, you know, what are your goals there with these kids as you look across, you know, your student body here? And I immediately said my goal would be to have every kid that gets off that bus become a graduate of my school. But the rub is how do you make that happen? You have to meet kids where they are, they all need a different level of support because they come from backgrounds that entail, you know, different resources, different support systems. So you have to meet them halfway, and which is not always the parking lot of the schools. Sometimes you have to venture into their backyards, into their living rooms to talk with their parents. But the only requirement I have of the kids is they have to be willing to get off the ports themselves. And that goes to another concept I've championed over time. I've always felt that teachers should be graded on a student's progress. You know, it should be a litmus test to how able they was, you know, the ability or capacity to relate with those kids from their location. I just always felt that some of your A students who teachers are quick to point out, sometimes A students are just, you know, determined to be A students, you know, that's just who they are, that's their makeup. And also sometimes it's their support structure they have at home. Now, another episode I like to talk about when I look at leaders and use it in tangibles. You know, leaders can't afford to be too regimented. Sometimes leaders like to hide behind what they call standard operational procedures or frameworks or instructions. I recall when I was coming through the Navy ranks and sometimes the captains would reward non-judicial punishment and they like to use it, turn it more into like technicalities, you know. And that's what sometimes when people are not comfortable more, like I said, the manager types, they like to use technicalities, vice intangibles to make the tough decisions. So oftentimes the captain would award the same punishment for every offense. And I just felt that, you know, it takes a little more effort to adjudicate these cases because I felt every offense was different and it had a unique human element. So I always wanted to get to the bottom, you know, of the actors that cause those incidents. So I would never, you know, just have a one-fix method. I always use instructions and procedures for framework to help me apply the intangibles once. I felt that was a matter of just being a confident leader. And lastly, let's get into the people versus system aspect. And I've just been really beating up this NCAA transfer porter. This one I look and I say, leaders always managers as appropriate. I just feel in this transfer portal time, I feel that you know leaders are always gonna have a capacity to develop people from the perspective of the players, where managers have more of an inclination to plug and play people into a fixed system. So, what the porter has done, it has allowed managers to assemble players, and they don't have to, you know, exhibit the capacity now to develop their own players and to be a cohesive team. They just go into the porter, and it gives them a false sense of leadership development because now they have the opportunity to recruit the pieces to fit their system. So they seek out the experience and the proven players whether than developing the in-house talent they have. So I just feel that this is over time is you know untenable as coaches must be leaders, you know, rather than just limiting themselves to being managers, they must scale their platforms, you know, to embrace the growth of members. Because the objective is to develop and holistically, you know, prepare student athletes for endurance success. So looking at moving to the future implications or the so what of this podcast, after listening in here, we have to be honest with our assessment of whether or not we are, you know, exceptional leaders or we're just really great managers with leadership attributes. Okay, do we develop people or do we pursue those who have already been developed? So as leaders, we must oversee people. You know, we have that honest on us for that regard. And where managers will probably continue to oversee systems and processes. And so if you are not a naturally gifted leader, that doesn't necessarily mean you can't get good at leading. You just have to make a commitment to continuously self-assess and shore up your weak areas. Now, leaders are good at managing risk, however, they must empower people by allowing team members the flexibility to expand their skills and stretch their performance envelopes. Leaders develop teams while managers are similar members. Extraordinary leaders are born. Managers with leadership attributes are made. Anthony Simmons. Please subscribe to my channel and join me for the next episode on upside down leadership. Apex Performance Podcast will continue to offer game-changing insights and accelerated pathways to excellence. Thank you for joining me, and I'll see you next time. Bye.

SPEAKER_00 21:37

So that's it for today's episode of Apex Performance. Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on iTunes or Apple Podcasts, we'll end a chance to win a grand prize drawing worth $5,000 for a private VIP day with Dr. Simmons himself. Be sure to visit ApexPerformance Podcast.com to pick up a free copy of your gift and ask your questions for Dr. Simmons in your own voice, and he'll answer you back privately in his. Then join us on the next episode.