Leadership has landmines though not the cool kind from an action movie.

Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler get into a conversation about the things that can quietly derail leaders and teams and, as usual, manage to wander into Apple, NASA, Steve Wozniak, JCPenney, ego, fear, cash flow, poker faces, and why sometimes the best thing a leader can do is get out of their own way.

The conversation starts with a Harvard Business Review idea about four behaviors that can cause serious trouble for leaders: certainty, inconsistency, emotional reactivity, and justification.

This isn't a lecture on leadership theory, it’s more like two people looking around the business world and saying, ‘Oh yeah. We've seen that.’ A lot.

There's the leader who becomes so certain they're right that contradictory information becomes nothing more than an annoying interruption.

There's the leader who is perfectly calm and reasonable one day and apparently auditioning for the role of “angry boss” the next. And everybody around them learns an important survival skill: figure out which version of the boss showed up this morning.

Then there's emotional reactivity.

Jeffrey freely admits that he doesn't exactly have a poker face, which is probably not ideal when you're running a company and your employees are trying to figure out the financial health of the organization by watching your eyebrows.

And that leads into one of the more personal parts of the conversation: what happens when you're running a business and cash flow is tight, payroll is looming, and every lost sale suddenly feels like a five-alarm fire.

Because leaders don't leave their emotions at the office door, neither do employees.

Then there's justification, the wonderfully human tendency to explain why the decision we made was actually a good decision, despite the increasingly large pile of evidence suggesting otherwise.

Rona and Jeffrey get into Ron Johnson's spectacularly complicated journey from Apple retail success to his much less successful run at JCPenney, and the uncomfortable question that follows almost every leadership failure: At what point do we stop explaining what happened and start asking what we did?

That's where this episode gets particularly interesting, because underneath all the stories is something much harder than leadership technique: Self-awareness.

It's easy to recognize bad leadership when somebody else is doing it. It's considerably more difficult when somebody says, ‘You know, you do that too.’

Suddenly we're not talking about leadership theory anymore. We're talking about ourselves.

And that's where Rona brings the conversation around to something that has become a recurring Biz-Souls theme: play. Not mandatory fun. No trust falls. Not another corporate exercise where everyone has to reveal their favorite kitchen appliance.

Real play.

The kind that lets people experiment, loosen up, see things differently, and—perhaps most importantly—stop treating every disagreement like a threat to their authority.

Maybe that's one of the best antidotes to leadership ego.

Sometimes you don't need another strategy session, you need to get out of your own head.

And laugh at yourself once in a while, because the funny thing about leadership landmines is that they're much easier to see when they're sitting under somebody else's desk.

Until you realize there's one under yours.

Listen to this episode, and then, just for fun, ask your team what you do that makes their lives harder.

We take no responsibility for what happens next, and we would really like to hear the answer.

Listen, subscribe, share, and bring your sense of humor, because business is serious, and people are complicated. And apparently, leaders are people too.

Related Biz-Souls episodes:

Episode 136: Mature Gnome with Ego

• https://open.spotify.com/episode/4SrTBRzWZ9MbhycJw5Nkwv

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sl6sKzNUWTo

The official Biz-Souls podcast archive is here as well: https://biz-souls.com/listen-now/