Part battle-savvy boardroom consigliere, part player-coach, part modern-day renaissance man, Michael J. Boydell has been the X factor behind the winning moves of elite-level performers for 20+ years. An oracle in the firestorm of uncertainty, he has the knack for spotting opportunity amid chaos and transforming challenges into breakthrough results, across business sectors, cultures, and continents.
Russ Alan Prince: You’ve worked with a lot of influential leaders in your career. What three characteristics must someone have to be a good leader?
Michael J. Boydell: Freedom, courage and power. In The Adventure Advantage, I refer to these as the three greatest adventures required for every leader to navigate disruptive change and realize breakthrough performance—when leading broad-reaching organizational change, high-functioning teams or growth within themselves.
The Freedom Adventure is about knowing yourself and discovering who you are in the world. It’s where you establish your own sense of authentic independence, master your strengths and fears, and develop a mantra you can trust. Without the Freedom Adventure, leaders stay stuck in someone else’s definition of who they should be, and never quite discover their own voice.
The Courage Adventure is where you show yourself in the bigger world and learn to see others as they are without trying to control or manipulate them. This is where you learn to celebrate diversity, achieving beyond what you could have ever done on your own. Without the Courage Adventure, leaders run the risk of over-controlling and continually stifling the kind of lasting prosperity born from true collaboration.
The Power Adventure is all about growing yourself so as never to get complacent or stagnant. Instead, a leader must be willing to give up past identities and level up beyond just status and titles. Stepping into new levels of intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual power renews one’s sense of vitality. The Power Adventure yields the sort of potency that leaves a leader feeling born again and avoiding the slow fade to irrelevance.
Prince: How have you seen leaders and leadership change over the course of your career?
Boydell: Over the last 30 years, we have seen an exponential increase in technological advancements, social connections and varying generational influences that are changing both the definition of work and the workplace around the world.
Those complex changes have spawned a whole new requirement for what I call leadership altitude and attitude. Leaders need to maintain a line of sight in altitude between the vision for the future and presence with current-day reality. At the same time, leaders need to strike a behavioral balance in attitude between being empathetic relationship builders and brave risk-takers. In this unpredictable landscape, leaders must be agile enough between their altitude and attitude to adjust quickly to ever-changing headwinds without missing out on fortuitous occasional tailwinds.
A leader’s altitude becomes compromised when they over-rely on vision and become blind to critical facts—like a distracted juggler they get swept away with grand schemes or new possibilities to escape a painful reality or the perceived boredom of staying on task. Other leaders compromise their altitude by over-relying on presence and losing sight of the big picture—like a constant critic stuck in the weeds, over-analyzing and over-perfecting.
Alternatively, a leader’s attitude is diminished when they over-rely on empathy and fail to create limits or protect important boundaries—like a perpetual pleaser endlessly serving others while their own dreams and desires drift away. Equally a leader’s attitude is diminished when they over-rely on bravery and fail to appreciate the emotional turmoil left in their wake—like a belligerent bully clinging to control while ignorant of the impact on others, or themselves.
Prince: When a CEO calls you for help in the midst of a crisis, what is your first course of action?
Boydell: The first thing I do in a situation like this is establish confidentiality. The person must know that this is a completely safe and private space to speak openly, and nothing we discuss will go any further than our conversation. This lays the groundwork for the kind of honest discussion that needs to take place in a crisis situation.
I ask open-ended questions, to get the individual thinking and talking candidly. Then comes the most important part which is listening. I listen for any of the four telltale signs of fear: frustration, envy, avoidance, and rumination. My radar is completely tuned into not just what the person is saying, but how they are saying it, why they are saying it, and as importantly, what they are not saying.
I might start by asking: What is your definition of winning in this circumstance? And why does that feel so important to you now? Where are you most stuck? Their answers never fail to get us moving toward the heart of the matter.
Prince: Every successful person has also experienced failure. Talk about the importance of failures and how to capitalize on those moments.
Boydell: Failure can often be one of the most important and defining moments of a person’s life—it has been for me. I recall hitting a low point in my life during my late 30s. From the outside, everything looked incredible. I had achieved career and financial success had the right house, was on the right street, and was mingling with the right crowds. And yet one night after an important executive dinner at a posh restaurant in London, I vividly remember returning to my empty hotel room and taking a long honest look in the mirror. It was the loneliest I had ever felt.
That ended up being a defining experience for me—it’s when I realized I was spending all my effort on striving for external validation. I was not tending to my inward life, which had fallen to an all-time low. That night changed my perspective completely and inspired me to readjust my priorities and take the necessary steps to transform my life. But the positive change would have never happened without first hitting rock bottom.
It took that painful reckoning to reclaim ownership of my life choices—my professional identity, my family roles and me personally. My relationship with work, money and intimacy. With loving support, wise counsel and dogged determination, I learned to confront and befriend my fears, harness them and grow beyond them. Tough stuff to tear apart, let alone admit openly, but I had to go through that experience to find my way back to the life that had been patiently waiting for my return.
Russ Alan Prince is the executive director of Private Wealth magazine and chief content officer for High-Net-Worth Genius. He consults with family offices, the wealthy, fast-tracking entrepreneurs and select professionals.
