The New Portrait Of Leadership: Paul McCarthy Of Paul Mac Leadership On Which Legacy Ideas About Leadership Need To Be Discarded, And Which New Approaches To Leadership Should Be Embraced

Transparent — leaders with this trait are congruent with words, behaviors, and actions — essentially, what you see is what you get. They are also driven by purpose before ego. This trait is also about cutting through the bureaucracy and being intentional in your approach without agenda or malice.

We are living in the Renaissance of Work. Just like great artists know that an empty canvas can become anything, great leaders know that an entire organization — and the people inside it — can become anything, too. Master Artists and Mastering the Art of Leadership draw from the same source: creation. In this series, we’ll meet masters who are creating the future of work and painting a portrait of lasting leadership. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Paul McCarthy.

Paul is an emerging thought leader regenerating the future of leadership. Over a 25 year career, he has supported thousands of leaders globally to develop their future leadership capabilities. He was positioned as Deloitte’s and KPMG’s subject matter expert for Talent Management and Leadership Development. Organizations such as TD, IBM and Forbes School of Business have recently brought Paul into speak with C-suite leaders on trends, challenges, and opportunities in the future of work and leadership. His first book, The F.I.R.E.D. Leader: Reinventing the Future of Leadership was published in November 2023 and endorsed by Marshall Goldsmith (New York Times bestselling author of Triggers), Whitney Johnson, John Spence (one of the top 100 business thought leaders in America), Professor Gary Hamel (ranked by The Wall Street Journal as the world’s most influential business thinker) and former WD40 CEO, Garry Ridge.

Thank you for joining us. Our readers would enjoy discovering something interesting about you. What are you in the middle of right now that you’re excited about personally or professionally?

It’s been a frenetic schedule in 2023 — in between supporting leadership teams to have open, honest and trust based conversations, to literally travelling for two months across the US back to Canada, living out of my SUV along the way and completing my first best-selling book, being interviewed on podcasts, recording my own podcast episodes (amazing acoustics by the way if you ever decide to record a podcast episode inside a shower in the middle of New Mexico at a remote hostel), to completing an end to end learning program that will introduce a new approach to how leaders are identified, recruited, onboarded and developed.

My first book was published in November and I’m in the middle of speaking with organizations about the principles underpinning why I wrote it. Getting the opportunity to focus on where this work will have the greatest impact (and then directing my energy towards that) is something I feel blessed to be able to do.

As I write this article, I have also literally just completed 9 hours of filming which will introduce the world’s first leadership program on disruptive leadership that I’ll be launching in Q1 2024.

We all get by with a little help from our friends. Who is the leader that has influenced you the most, and how?

John Spence — I met John as part of the path I am on to regenerate the future of leadership. He has become an informal mentor to me throughout this journey (I’m not sure he knows he has that title 😊), though he truly is someone who walks the talk and is congruent with what he says. His philosophy, mindset and approach remind me of a wise old saying from my wise Irish uncle Tony, who would always say ‘say what you mean and mean what you say’.

Sometimes our biggest mistakes lead to our biggest discoveries. What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made as a leader, and what did you discover as a result?

I think my biggest mistake as a leader was ‘to show up as advertised.’ Meaning, as part of extensive, expensive, and time-consuming interviews to be recruited as a leader into a range of organizations, I was quite literally recruited for the leadership qualities that I would ultimately be fired for when I displayed them.

I wouldn’t know it then, though my biggest mistake as a leader would be my biggest discovery as a leader too. My firings led me down a deep path of self-reflection about me as a human and as a leader. I noticed a ‘niggling’ feeling that wouldn’t leave me — which made me question if our current approaches to developing leaders (it would go further into also asking about the way we identify, recruit and onboard leaders) were preparing those leaders, future leaders and organizations for the future. I was typically hired for having certain leadership qualities and then when I displayed them, I would get fired — this incongruence, disconnect and apparent hypocrisy intrigued me to further explore. I began researching content and overviews of as many leadership development programs as I could over a 6–12 month period and realized that the five leadership qualities I was hired and fired for (which would later become: F.I.R.E.D — Fresh Thinking; Inquisitive Nature, Real & Accountable, Expressive & Challenging and Direct & Transparent) were missing from how leaders seemed to be developed.

As my curiosity heightened, I began talking with others in the L&D space, including leadership development specialists and those in the HR, leadership space about what I was seeing — attending a few conferences as part of research and talking with people about this. I also researched leadership identification, recruitment and onboarding practices as part of this. The point I want to stress here is that this was an accidental path for me and I wanted to fit into the organizations that had hired me. As part of every leadership identification, recruitment and onboarding experience with the organizations I’d been interviewing with, I conveyed my leadership mindset, style, approach and philosophy — which was openly embraced during the hiring process. Yet as I began working with each organization, I literally ‘practiced what I preached’, ‘did what it said on the tin’, was the leader who turned up and displayed the leader qualities I had conveyed as part of the interview processes. And it appeared that wasn’t welcomed.

How has your definition of leadership changed or evolved over time? What does it mean to be a leader now?

My direct experience of being fired for being a F.I.R.E.D. leader has ultimately served as the initial catalyst for my self-reflection, hypothesis generation and research into this field. It has taken me down a path of questioning whether our global definitions of leadership are growing increasingly irrelevant as the future of work begins to reveal how and why we will need a different kind of leader to navigate ongoing disruption.

As part of my research, I began to ruffle the feathers of some in the leadership development industry because even pre Covid-19 I was asserting that our approaches to leadership were broken, and few were (or still are) openly talking about this. With $366billion spent on leadership development each year and rising according to DDI, a meager 14% of those who ‘procure’ such leadership development think it works.

It’s precisely because there are so many different opposing and contradictory leadership models already in existence that we are in this global situation of having dysfunctional and outdated definitions and approaches to leadership. I aim to simplify the way we look at leadership and advocate for an approach to defining and being a leader that is not based on convoluted or complex theories of what works vs what doesn’t work that are derived from peer reviewed and academic type experimentation. The world is waking up to a new kind of leader — and this kind of leader isn’t created or validated through an academic lab experiment. Being a leader now and in the future means being open to thinking differently, not being afraid to challenge the status quo, always showing up as real, cutting through unnecessary bureaucracy and not playing political games. New ways of thinking about leadership are gaining traction — and underpinning this is the notion that the leaders we marginalize, discredit and fire are the leaders (with the leadership qualities) that will increasingly be needed to be a future-ready leader to navigate ongoing disruption.

Success is as often as much about what we stop as what we start. What is one legacy leadership behavior you stopped because you discovered it was no longer valuable or relevant?

For as long as I remember, I’ve always over delivered. I take on a project and tend to agonize over making sure the quality of input is consistently high from everyone, including my own. As a leader, I’ve set the bar for delivering a certain threshold of quality. This has often resulted in my own workload being too demanding and setting unexpectedly high expectations of others who work with me on projects. Needing things to be ‘right first time’ is a legacy behavior from years spent working in the management consulting industry, where simply put, if the client deliverable has any mistakes or quality issues at all, then it doesn’t go out to the client until is perfect. As a leader in those types of environments, it’s an uncomfortable balance between ensuring the client is satisfied with the work and those on the consulting team are given career development opportunities as well as maintaining some sort of semblance of work / life balance. And by my own admission, I’ve often not got the balance right. Through my own journey as a thought leader on the future of leadership, I’ve also seen this legacy behavior surface with those in my practice — and am consciously trying to address it when it surfaces. Looking in the mirror and seeing what this reflects back about me has been an uncomfortable yet necessary realization — namely, that needing to control the way work is completed doesn’t inspire creativity in others and actually leads to an erosion of trust. The two hallmarks of effective leaders are to inspire trust and creativity in others, so coming face to face with this as a leader myself, whilst regenerating the future of leadership has been a painful self-admission.

What is one lasting leadership behavior you started or are cultivating because you believe it is valuable or relevant?

I’ve begun taking more conscious time to looking at (and addressing) my own leadership blind spots. One of the simplest and most effective tools that I’ve found to support this is the Johari Window. For those not aware of it, it’s a tool designed to improve both self-awareness and how we self-communicate. It’s a tool that helps people understand the types of biases they have and looks at our behaviors through four different lens’:

1. Behaviors that are known to ourselves and known to others (open area).
2. Behaviors that are not known to ourselves and known to others (our blind spots).
3. Behaviors that are not known to ourselves and not known to others (unknown).
4. Behaviors that are known to ourselves and not known to others (hidden area).

Each year I take some time to review the preceding year and map out what the next year could contain. A critical component of this is to take time (four times throughout the year) to complete this blind spot work on myself. It allows an honest look in the mirror to reflect on areas that can be addressed — again, this is not an easy activity to do, though it’s something I advocate with every leader I have worked with because this aspect of leadership development is often lacking in how leaders are developed.

What advice would you offer to other leaders who are stuck in past playbooks and patterns and may be having a hard time letting go of what made them successful in the past?

One of the reasons why the leadership industry is broken is because of the plethora of playbooks currently in circulation. Many have coined terms for what Covid-19 has resulted in — ‘the great resignation’ is one such term, though as tragic as it has been and continues to be, it has also been a lever to accelerate this conversation.

We are in a period of ‘great awakening and imagining’. Imagining a new future means letting go of past playbooks. Leaders who are stuck in past playbooks and patterns are slowly becoming aware that the leadership industry and approaches to leadership haven’t been working — Gallup’s estimated cost of global disengagement is currently $8.8 trillion each year (and rising). It’s estimated that the typical cost to replace a leader who exits an organization runs between 213–400% of that leader’s base salary. HBR estimated that 1 in 4 of an organization’s ‘high potentials’ was considering leaving their organization (that was pre pandemic). Clearly, what we have been doing hasn’t been working. From research like this and other sources I have reviewed, people are beginning to become aware of the impact that outdated playbooks are having on their organization, their teams, and their leaders.

My advice remains the same as it did when I first started talking about this in 2018. Leaders must be open to the initial conversation that old playbooks haven’t worked. To have such conversations, we first need to be able to create the conditions for honest conversations in an organization that are carried out without blame or judgement. If we can achieve this, we can begin to have the needed conversations about the true state of ineffectiveness that characterizes how we identify, recruit, onboard and develop our leaders. The one thing that I have personally seen as being an impediment to this is when a leader refuses (because of their ego) to admit that old playbooks are outdated — and I want to stress that this is a natural human reaction to change. We tend to operate from a position of fear when we resist change, and my advice here is to truly be open to what I call ‘listening to understand’ the leader who is seemingly ‘set in their ways’.

When people really feel heard, they also feel understood — and it’s through an understanding of what motivates people who resist that we can slowly open them up to trying new things. I refer to this as looking for the ‘1% marginal gain and it starts one conversation at a time. From what we have experienced since the Covid-19 pandemic, the new world of work and the pace of change is ever evolving and at an unprecedented pace. Leaders need the ability to adapt at a faster pace than before. And it is through such adaptation that new, exploratory ways of embracing future playbooks can flourish. I’m reminded of something said by one of the most preeminent figures and scholars who has written about disruption and disruptive innovation — Clayton Christensen. Christensen’s work on disruption in business has found that if an established company pursues growth in a new market, the odds of success are six times greater, and the revenue potential is 20 times greater than in incremental growth in an established market. I find myself asking if the same mindset could help those stuck in past playbooks and patterns as they approach the future leadership playbook needed to navigate this ongoing disruption we now face.

Many of our readers can relate to the challenge of leading people for the first time. What advice would you offer to new and emerging leaders?

It can be intimidating and overwhelming becoming a leader for the first time. In working with many emerging leaders, I’ve seen many fall into traps not of their own making or choosing. I believe that at the heart of effective leadership (and one of the leadership traits we will continue to see differentiate great leaders) is the ability to be honest, practice what you preach as a leader and have the courage of your convictions. This can take many forms. At a practical level this means owning your words, behaviors and actions and being self-accountable before anything else. I’ve supported hundreds of leaders directly and thousands more indirectly and one of the most raised challenges that these leaders have is that in order to ‘advance in their organization’, they feel unable to be completely honest. Why?

Elsewhere I write about the hypocrisy of leadership in greater detail, though this example is clearly one that shows how we have normalized hypocrisy in our current approaches to leadership — an organization states it values and wants honesty, though once such honesty is displayed, the honest leader becomes a ‘pariah’. Emerging leaders (and the available research on perceived leadership effectiveness) are increasingly gravitating to honest leadership.

Emerging leaders will increasingly have the opportunity to eliminate organizational hierarchies, over reliance on leadership titles (and the contrived competitiveness that often accompanies this), as well as be role models for orchestrating and maintaining an organizational and leadership culture in which real conversations with direct reports, peers and immediate supervisors take place on a regular basis. Through this, emerging leaders will be positioned to replace current outdated one-sided performance assessments that many organizations I have seen are characterized by.

Another suggestion for emerging leaders’ is to not play outdated political games. You can create and live the leadership culture you want to see in place as an emerging leader — it really is that straightforward. Much of my earlier career was spent supporting leaders as part of global transformation initiatives. Many well intentioned (but complacency inducing) statements would often don the walls of the corporate corridors, including some of my favorites, ‘that’ll never work’, ‘we tried that before’ or ‘nothing’s going to change’.

As an emerging leader, don’t listen to those who tell you these things. The future of work belongs to future leaders who are congruent with their words, behaviors, and actions. As the word emerging implies, it’s about growing which means it needs the right conditions to support it as it continues to be cultivated and embraced. This means two important things for emerging leaders. Firstly, we need to recognize as future leaders begin to emerge, they will continue to evolve, so our ‘definition’ of what leadership is must also continue to evolve. And secondly, this must also be reflected in how we design and structure our future organizations. For those interested in finding out more about future organizational structures and the rise of the self-managed organizational structure, Frederic Laloux’s pioneering work in this field is captured in his seminal work ‘Reinventing Organizations’. I’ve long been a proponent of Laloux’s work and believe that one area missing from work in this field is to agree on the leadership qualities that will increasingly be needed by emerging leaders within these emerging organizational and self-managed structures.

One final thought for emerging leaders. You think differently than your predecessors and such divergent approaches to thinking (some call this nonlinear thinking, as philanthropist, founder of a global movement on nonlinear thinking, The Octopus Movement, Perry Knoppert and friend, advocates for). In recent conversations with Perry, we played with the concept of what it means to be ‘emerging’, both from an emerging mind perspective and as an emerging leader. The emerging mind and leader of the future is rooted in the ability to think differently. And to think differently, this requires the organizational and leadership conditions are created that celebrate a leader’s ability to dare to think and act differently. Not an easy feat, but one that emerging leaders and emerging organizations of the future will not just need, they will demand. As a side note, my research has found from those in the HR industry (there are over 200 types of bias), the fastest growing one is ‘cognitive diversity’ bias. Simply put, it’s a bias against people who think and approach thinking differently than others.

Based on your experience or research, what are the top five traits effective leaders exemplify now?

From my analysis of research, effective leaders are characterized by the traits outlined below. These traits will also increasingly be needed by leadership and organizations to navigate ongoing disruption. These qualities are:

1. Challenge — leaders who are courageous challengers of the status quo. This is easy to say, harder to do in practice. Unless you embed it into how your staff and leaders are onboarded. Square Root, an Austin based technology startup (acquired by CDK global) — whose Director of People and Culture states ‘the company has taken the stigma out of troublemaking’. This was achieved through the company sending a letter to the entire team introducing the concept of a troublemaker. Square Root has embedded the need (and expectation) to challenge as part of every staff member (and leader) role. The feedback so far indicates an increase in both productivity and effectiveness.
2. Purpose Focused — leaders who are purpose driven, build trust quickly and curiously innovate. The name Ted Selker may not mean anything, though Ted created the ‘red dot’ on the IBM /Lenovo ThinkPad. Leaders like Ted can’t stop coming up with new ideas; it’s just how leaders who are purpose focused are wired. When they see a problem, they want to find and work with people to find creative ways to fix it. They want to simplify complexity. They dare to think differently and don’t apologize for how their mind works. While they can come up with ideas on how to make incremental improvements, they’re often more motivated to rethink or redesign the entire thing, whether that be a product or a process. They’re never satisfied with how things are because they constantly see how things could be better. To use a cliché, they’re ‘big picture thinkers’ and inspire those around them with this different way of thinking and approaching leadership.
3. Real — leaders who are real show up authentically in every setting, not just as a leader. From my research in this specific trait of what makes an effective leader, ‘being real’ can often appear in the research as ‘authentic’, as ‘compassionate’, as ‘human centered’, ‘servant’ and a range of others. Research conducted by Charn McAllister, Sherry Moss and Mark J. Martinko (Why Likable Leaders Seem More Effective), found within the top six management journals over the past five years, ‘134 articles on leadership promoting at least 29 different leadership theories including “authentic,” “transformational,” “charismatic,” “ethical,” and “servant” leadership. The authors also found 161 articles focused on discussing various leadership theories and styles. Despite this rhetoric though, being real as a leader in everyday practice as a leader seems to be an anomaly. I found a leader called Nick Sarillo who did the unthinkable. He told the truth. He prematurely expanded his pizzeria and was facing decreasing revenues. Against the advice of his bankers, shareholders, employees, friends, and others — Nick posted a public letter on the restaurant’s website titled ‘An Uncertain Future’. I think it’s a masterful lesson in being real. No leadership development playbook exists on this, yet this is what being real is all about.
4. Transparent — leaders with this trait are congruent with words, behaviors, and actions — essentially, what you see is what you get. They are also driven by purpose before ego. This trait is also about cutting through the bureaucracy and being intentional in your approach without agenda or malice. The ousted former CEO of Airbus, Christian Strieff is one such example of a leader with this trait. When he was brought in, Airbus was seriously behind its production schedule — to the tune of two years — of the A380, which is to this day the world’s largest passenger plane. He knew what needed to be done and was brought in for the health of the company. Though despite a 12-month recruitment campaign, his recommended strategy was not welcomed by the Airbus board. Strieff refused to play the political game, opting instead to address the reality that Airbus was two years behind on its production promises and this could lead to insolvency and would have a bigger impact on the respective economies Airbus served. He had prioritized the survival of the company over the literal politics of some of its shareholders. Strieff was eventually fired by the Airbus board after he delivered a ‘back me or sack me’ resignation threat. Streiff had a plan that would work for the good of the organization to the tune of €5 billion. He knew it was the right thing to do for the entity that had been entrusted to his care. When he began to do what he was hired to do, however, he ran afoul of the politics surrounding the multinational. He was faced with two options: Stay and play the game, thereby betraying the best interests of Airbus, or pursue what he knew was right and let the cards fall where they may.
5. Curiosity — leaders with this trait always ask why things are the way they are, can be a constant source of new ideas and innovation because they think differently and approach things from a beginner’s mindset. Tech founder Michael Dell was once asked to name an attribute CEOs will need to survive forthcoming disruption. His succinct answer: ‘I would place my bet on curiosity.’ Hollywood producer Brian Grazer, with blockbuster films such as A Beautiful Mind and Apollo 13 to his credit, wrote in his book A Curious Mind, ‘If you’re the boss, and you manage by asking questions, you’re laying the foundation for the culture of your company’. He had a practice of going around the world having ‘curiosity conversations’. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt once said, ‘We run this company based on questions, not answers’. Patagonia founder Yves Chouinard wrote in his book Let My People Go Surfing, ‘[T]he worst thing said about him is that he was “uncurious”. And how about research from Oregon State University which provides solid data to back up these leaders’ perspectives. In the paper ‘Outside the box: Epistemic curiosity as a predictor of creative problem solving and creative performance’, the researchers found a correlation for people testing higher for the trait of curiosity on personality tests and their ability to creatively approach tasks. Just their innate inquisitive nature allowed them to be more innovative.

American Basketball Coach John Wooden said, “Make each day your masterpiece.” How do you embody that quote? We welcome a story or example.

‘Wherever I am right now’ is where I’m supposed to be — this has guided the way I approach life since I began my path of regenerating the future of leadership five years ago. And it’s not easy to always remain balanced in that state and it’s because of this dis-ease (that I believe we all experience) that I have surrendered to the natural laws of the universe.

In 2020 I decided to invest in my self-development by opening to a series of philosophies that would ultimately shape how I aim to ‘make each day my masterpiece’. A key component of this was to set myself a ‘power life script’ (a term created by an author I follow), which is basically a manifestation of how I envisage living my life. I have never shared it (or components of it) publicly, though it feels right to at this point because it has guided the way I see life, how I approach challenges and the way in which I make decisions.

“I am open to all possibilities, believe in my capabilities, have faith in the universe…”

….is how my manifestation begins. It’s something I keep in my wallet and look at sometimes up to four times a day. I often read it out loud and at other times, I internalize it (or parts of the whole statement).

This simple statement acts as both a means to decompress and to give myself permission to feel a bigger goal, a bigger dream, a more meaningful outcome. Does it mean that I am oblivious to the pitfalls and challenges of modern living — no, not at all. But it does serve as a guide and a reminder that every day we get to choose how we show up, how we see others around us and how we see ourselves. And it keeps me grounded, humbled, grateful and hungry for what the universe continues to unfold.

What is the legacy you aspire to leave as a leader?

I want to show through my thought leadership that future leaders will increasingly be identified, recruited, onboarded and developed based on the leadership qualities that currently get them either marginalized, ostracized or terminated from organizations.

I foresee conversations that staff and leaders have around the office watercooler (whether that be virtual or in person) about how they love working with leaders who dare to think and act differently, courageously challenge the status quo, refuse to play the political game, and refuse to wear professional masks. I see the organizations that are having these conversations as having normalized how leaders like this are identified, cultivated, and embraced.

By playing a small part in reframing the narrative that demonizes its ‘agitators’ (to quote Professor Gary Hamel), the legacy I aspire leaving the leadership industry (and as a leader myself) is to create the conditions for organizations and leaders to openly talk about (and address) these historically and systemically toxic, dysfunctional and outdated approaches, systems and processes that current leadership is characterized by.

How can our readers connect with you to continue the conversation?

I’m always open to having meaningful conversations with new people and can be contacted through Linkedin (Paul McCarthy) or my website — www.paulmacleadership.com

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to experience a leadership master at work. We wish you continued success and good health!

About The Interviewer: Karen Mangia is one of the most sought-after keynote speakers in the world, sharing her thought leadership with over 10,000 organizations during the course of her career. As Vice President of Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce, she helps individuals and organizations define, design, and deliver the future. Discover her proven strategies to access your own success in her fourth book, “Success from Anywhere,” and by connecting with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.