Unleashing Individuality: The leadership skill that unlocks all others

By Glenn Llopis

We suppress individuality without even knowing it. We inadvertently keep people functioning far below their full capacity. We fail to see and support each other's full humanity. As a result, people hold themselves back.

We can't afford to have people feeling stifled as we tackle our most urgent challenges, to:

-thrive in perpetual uncertainty
-lead or advance within hybrid remote teams
-elevate our commitment to health and wellbeing
-achieve true diversity and inclusion

The temptation is to try to solve for each separately. But all are linked and can be addressed when we recognize they all share the same major obstacle: suppressed individuality. Author and strategist Glenn Llopis breaks individuality down into its component parts and offers a practical method to help you continuously assess, interrupt and pivot from suppressing to unleashing.

This is your new playbook. It's packed with:

-Individual stories of people unleashing individuality
-Demonstrations of cross-sector collaboration in action
-Practical tools and methods to get started immediately.

Whatever you're trying to accomplish, you need people at their fullest capacities connecting with and elevating each other as they contribute to a shared mission, individually and collectively. Interrupt your assumptions about who belongs where, doing what, and how. We make assumptions about capabilities based on education or experience. We make assumptions about personality based on groups we (often unconsciously) associate people with. We make assumptions about how someone should perform a task based on how it's been done in the past. How stifling!

This book will teach you the skill of interrupting those assumptions. It's painful to realize how much we hold ourselves and others back. But it's also freeing to see that we have the power to unleash ourselves and others. Let's unleash each other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781733812535

Glenn Llopis

Glenn Llopis is a Cuban-American executive, entrepreneur, senior advisor and speaker to Fortune 500 organizations in retail, consumer packaged goods, healthcare and beyond. He heads a workforce development and business strategy consulting firm that develops high-performance leaders, teams and cultures focused on inclusion and the power of individuality. He is a frequent speaker and a contributor to Forbes.com.

Book preview

Preface

As a kid, I looked up to my older brother. We were very different people, and he had strong opinions about what would make me worthy of his respect in return. You have to have an MBA. You have to go to a big school. You need a corporate job. He accomplished all of those things and rose to high levels at MillerCoors, PepsiCo, and Aramark—reaching the C-suite as chief strategy officer. I pursued those goals as well. But my accomplishments at school were of a different

sort. I struggled with tests, and graduated with a B average at UCLA, and later I studied hard for my GMATs, but I failed miserably. But I excelled at things not measured by tests and grades. I led and was involved in several academic groups and councils. At the time, I was the only political science major to be accepted as a Peer Health Counselor who wasn’t majoring in that subject. I ended up being one of 20 people in my graduating class to be recognized with a Senior Spotlight for my leadership and work in crisis prevention. But it was clear that an MBA was out of the question, and the feeling that I would never be respected by my brother cut me to my core.

Still, I got a corporate job in the food and beverage industry and was an executive by age 25. But my entrepreneurial nature wasn’t a great fit for such standardized work environments. I didn’t like being micromanaged and I was much more suited to excel at things that weren’t measured on tests—things like seeing people for who they are and being genuinely interested in maximizing their potential. My father gave me the gift of seeing this in me even as a kid, and he valued it and praised me for it. But that’s not an accomplishment that’s as identifiable as an MBA, so it took me a while to value it in myself.

I was reminded of this capacity of mine one day early in my corporate career. The company president received a call from a potential business partner from Mexico, and she redirected that call to me because, in her words: I can’t even understand him, his English is so bad. You speak Spanish, you talk to him. It was clear she had no interest in what this caller had to say. She devalued him on the spot and saw him only as someone beneath her—to her, he didn’t matter and didn’t have anything worthy to contribute. Turns out, he was a member of one of Mexico’s most influential families, and the chairman of a nationally and internationally recognized food and real estate business. Ultimately, I ended up starting my own business and partnering with him, which we sold for a profit. He and I are still like family to this day.

I ran my own businesses for several years, and now have been consulting with corporate leaders for more than a decade. In fact, I am usually the one leading, training, and mentoring people who have those recognizable credentials. But still, in the back of my mind, I have felt like an underachiever because I never got that MBA and didn’t follow that particular corporate path. My brother set that as a standard, and that was a fine standard for him (and it obviously works well for many others). It suited him. It didn’t suit me.

I have spent years advocating for people to break free from the traps of standardization: creating strategies for institutions, comprehensive assessment tools, training programs, and advanced executive coaching methods to help people lead in a way that honors today’s age of personalization to drive sustainable growth. I’ve worked with thousands of people at some of the biggest corporations in the world. Still, I felt less-than because I didn’t meet my brother’s particular standards. I had somehow come to believe that without those credentials, I didn’t matter.

I am not alone.

Just yesterday I had three separate two-hour conversations with three different corporate leaders, both men and women, and every one of them cried during our conversation. This is not unusual. They’re each going through my leadership training program, which includes in-depth, one-on-one consultations along the way. Over the years I’ve had hundreds of these conversations and almost half of the individuals end up crying. Why? Because they realize how oppressed and suppressed they’ve been— oppressed by the standards set by others and suppressed by their own acceptance of those standards. They also cry because they finally feel seen: someone else acknowledges their value as an individual. This is the first step in activating someone’s full capacity and in supporting someone’s dignity.

Donna Hicks, Ph.D., is an associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. She is an expert in human dignity and a specialist in conflict resolution. Through her work, she identified a major obstacle in our human relationships: Our failure to recognize how vulnerable humans are to being treated as if they didn’t matter.

These opening examples might seem small compared to the truly egregious ways humans oppress each other. But that’s why I like them to begin this conversation. They show how insidious this problem is—the everyday ways we are made to feel like we don’t matter. But beware: we tend to identify with the people being suppressed. But we are also the ones doing the suppressing. In the ways we learn, work, lead and conduct business, it’s time we interrupt our assumptions about who belongs where, doing what, and how.

We have value : we want to be included.

We are worthy : we want to be seen in our full humanity.

We are unique : we want to be ourselves.

We have experience and insight : we want to do more.

We have ideas : we want to explore our possibility.

It’s painful to realize how much we hold ourselves and others back. But it’s also freeing to see that we have the power to unleash ourselves and others. Let’s unleash each other.

Introduction

Most organizations are not prepared for what is about to hit them.

That was a prediction from RBC Capital Markets managing director Nik Modi—a prediction he made at a leadership summit my firm produced back in October 2019.

Before Covid.

Talk about an understatement.

There was no way for Nik to know the extent to which his prediction would be true. None of us were ready for what 2020 threw at us. How could we be?

Many people suffered truly heartbreaking losses throughout the events of 2020, on levels both personal and professional. All of us had to adapt and change something about the way we learn, work, lead, and live.

You might have been suddenly working from home (and teaching your kids from home), with team members from afar, with a workload that was chaotic and unmanageable. Or maybe you were furloughed indefinitely, feeling abandoned with no concrete date of return, your calendar unnervingly empty. Or you might have been on the front lines, fearing for your life, working nonstop, stressed about remaining healthy, and worried that you might bring the virus into your home.

Then, just a few months into the pandemic, we saw the horrific murder of George Floyd by police, and pain and anguish flooded the streets in expressions of outrage that were both necessary and inevitable. You might have taken to the streets or social media, calling for justice and for our nation to finally confront our systemic racism—skeptical about the promises of change made by leaders of public and private institutions. Or, you might have been afraid of those in the streets or offended by their calls to reform or abolish institutions you still believe in—resenting those public promises that seem to leave you outside of an institution that used to feel like home.

Through it all, we adapted in the moment because we had to. There was an urgency and an immediacy throughout 2020 and into 2021. We watched our old ways disappear as we changed the ways we work, serve, and learn. And what happened? Sometimes we fought and argued. Often, we became more interconnected and interdependent. It wasn’t perfect. It never is.

The events of 2020 set a lot of transformations in motion that we’ve needed but have been fighting for a while: the shifting of at least some college, work, and healthcare online; a reckoning with our nation’s systemic racism; and the elevation of health and wellbeing as a priority in our workplaces and schools, to name just a few. I don’t mean to make light of any of it, because there’s no silver lining that would make it worth losing so many lives to Covid or to brutality and hate. But we’ve now seen and experienced how much we can change when we need to.

We Have Reached the Day of Reckoning

Here’s the thing: it’s much easier to change in crisis mode. In crisis mode, you can make a sweeping change that people don’t like and blame the crisis. You can make mistakes along the way and people will (mostly) be understanding because of the crisis. You can make hard decisions and kick the consequences down the line because of the crisis.

But, now what?

Now you and your organization must decide what changes stay and what changes go. Now you must make good on all those promises for racial justice, diversity, and inclusion. Now you must learn how to lead when some of your workforce wants to come back on site while others want to remain remote. Now you must figure out how to maintain a focus on wellbeing even as the urgency of the global health crisis starts to wane. In 2020, we were all forced to wear masks. But we also had an awakening: a realization that we’d been forced to wear masks our entire lives. And we’re tired of it.

Just when you thought: phew, glad that’s over. That’s when the harder change begins.

I’ve assessed thousands of leaders over the years and worked one- on-one with hundreds. It’s not the change itself that makes people so frustrated and exhausted. It’s having change forced on them with no input. It’s knowing that another forced change will come around again next year and suspecting that none of it will make any difference. It’s watching senior leaders surrender to the futility of forced change without fighting for a chance to have influence on the decisions. It’s hearing feel-good words that you know will never become actions, feeling like you’ll never be empowered to have any influence of your own.

We are at a precarious point. We’ve made some big changes during the pandemic, and we’ve made some big promises during the social unrest. Whether or not we can sustain those changes and fulfill those promises comes down to what we do from this point forward.

If you’re reading this book, you probably have some role to play in these changes and promises as they relate to how we learn, work, lead, and conduct business. Whether you’re CEO, front line, doctor, professor, president, assistant, Gen Z, baby boomer … whether you’re in charge of facilities, increasing diversity, motivating students, inventing new products, delivering healthcare … no matter your title or your role, every one of us must unleash individuality for ourselves and for those we lead, teach, and serve.

The tumultuous 2020 shined a spotlight on four urgent challenges and opportunities for leaders at every level:

How to lead or advance within hybrid remote teams

How to thrive in perpetual uncertainty

How to fulfill your promises of diversity and inclusion

How to elevate your commitment to health and wellbeing

How we address these challenges will shape our next decade. The temptation is to try to solve for each separately. But all four are linked and can be addressed when we recognize that they all share the same major obstacle: suppressed individuality. In the following chapters, I’ll show why unleashing individuality plays such a prominent role in meeting our most urgent challenges and turning them into opportunities.

Most important, I’ll give you a system for assessing five key indicators so you can continuously see where you’re stuck and find places to interrupt and pivot toward leadership that knows, trusts, and values individuals. From my organization’s research and hands-on work with leaders across multiple industries, I know that there are five areas* where we cling too tightly to standards that stifle individuality, and that two of those areas in particular hold us back: an approach to diversity that obstructs inclusion, and a reliance on poorly defined success metrics that limit people and impede new thinking. (*These are the five shifts defined in my previous book, Leadership in the Age of Personalization, which I’ll review in more detail in Chapter 6.)

If You Are Ready for Action: This Book Is for You

Throughout this book I’ll share individual stories of people who are unleashing individuality by looking for places to interrupt the outdated standards that are holding us back and pivot toward something better.

But as I’ve learned over these past few years, we can’t just learn new tricks and experiment on our own, in isolation within our own organizations. We must seek partnership with people from different companies, from different sectors, from different stages of life. In fact, we’d be foolish not to. No matter your sector—corporate, healthcare, higher education—we are all seeking to best serve a more informed and knowledgeable individual. With that in mind, we’re all learning how to put people at the center, to activate individual capacity while prioritizing health and wellbeing; how to lead through industry transformation when there’s so much uncertainty; and how to pursue and employ inclusion as a growth strategy going forward.

For three years in a row my company has hosted intensive Leadership in the Age of Personalization Summits (inspired by my previous book by the same name), where senior leaders explore how personalization impacts the future of their sectors and what it means for how they lead people, strategy, and innovation. These are leaders who recognize that they and their peers fall into standardization traps that suppress individuals, and they are looking for ways to interrupt those patterns and unleash people. This has become a movement.

Their passion for this work led me to create a way for all of us to dig into it even deeper, in the form of the Leadership in the Age of Personalization Consortium. We held a series of strategy sessions in 2021, and I’ll be sharing insights from those sessions throughout this book. I am sharing our experience with you for two reasons: first, every single person who has participated in this process has shared so much wisdom, I can’t help but pass that along to you; second, I want you to see this process in action, to give you a model that you can follow. It’s easy to tell you that you should collaborate across sectors. What’s harder is to actually do it.

Participants included corporate presidents and other C-level leaders, university deans and professors, doctors and healthcare administrators, and consultants. We also made a point to include those who can share experiences as employees, customers, and, in one case, a patient who talked about the lack of individuality during her experience battling cancer in her 20s.

This process was far more in-depth than focus groups or roundtable discussions. My company led a series of virtual working sessions, typically two hours each, in which consortium members discussed, debated, and brainstormed solutions to the most pressing challenges they said they’ve been dealing with before, during, and after the pandemic. Participants were forthcoming and real with their assessments of themselves, their organizations, and their industries. Because people were so generously candid, I’ll keep their quotes anonymous unless I have their permission to share something publicly.

I hope you’ll be inspired to initiate your own cross-sector brain trust.

Whatever you’re trying to accomplish, you need people at their fullest capacities connecting with and elevating each other as they contribute to a shared mission, individually and collectively. That’s why unleashing individuality is the leadership skill that unlocks all others. This book will give you a system for achieving that. It’s a system because there is no one metric for success. There is no single annual evaluation on which you’ll be judged. It’s a process for continuous evaluation and evolution. It’s a process that anyone can employ at any time. It’s a process of continuous assessment to find useful interruptions so you can pivot toward unleashing individuality.

By its very nature, the habit of interruption generates its own cycle of progress. And progress must remain a cycle, because there is no ultimate end point where no more change is needed. For example, there is no static state of inclusion. Just because an organization or a team is inclusive today doesn’t mean it will remain so by tomorrow. It works the other way as well: just because a team is exclusive today doesn’t mean it can’t interrupt itself and move toward inclusion tomorrow. The same can be said for each of our big challenges.

In other words, there is hope.

PART I

Individuality

Suppressed

"I wish I was 23 again, because I had a lot of fresh thoughts. Most of them were

too much for a Fortune 500 company, and I spent 19 years trying to cool those

thoughts down. You don’t spend 19 years at a large company being successful

without a high level of assimilation. I discovered that I really wish I had

my 23-year-old self, and now it’s really hard to find.

And I’m sad about that."

—MEGAN FRITZ

1

Overcoming

Standardization

Jeff Blue was in law school when he learned that some people get paid to listen to music for a living. It was one of those moments: as he heard this guy describe the life of an A&R (artists and repertoire) rep—listening to demos, going to see bands, scouting and nurturing musical talent, and bringing those musicians into a record label—Jeff’s pulse quickened; his vision seemed more vibrant. He knew this is what he was going to do. He got a job as an intern at MCA Records,

and he learned that the accepted path to A&R was to start as someone’s assistant. He asked every single executive there if he could be their assistant. Every single one said no. Why? Because he was in law school.

I knew intrinsically I had the qualities to be an A&R person [to scout and develop musical talent], but I didn’t have them on paper. I didn’t have the connections. I didn’t have the experience. But I knew that I had the talent and the drive. It’s good that he had the drive, because it turned out he would need it.

They told me, ‘You’re in law school, you can’t do anything creative. Plus, you’re the type of person who would take my job.’ I got tired of hearing that, and it was frustrating because I was working so freaking hard. And all I wanted to do is be an assistant, because that was the springboard to A&R.

Jeff was determined to make himself indispensable to the people who could help him get a foot in the door. He was open enough to look for opportunity in unexpected places. One day he was in an executive’s office and noticed something that he’d remembered seeing in every other executive’s office too: music magazines. He started reading those same magazines and noticed they all included reviews of new bands. I realized there were journalists writing these reviews, and these executives were relying on these journalists to help them discover new artists.

So, rather than continue trying to get an assistant job that no one wanted to give him, while he took a temporary government job to pay the bills, Jeff also set out to become a music journalist. He called every single magazine there was; they all told him no because—once again—he didn’t have the right résumé. But he kept