The uncomfortable work of leadership

Half a life ago, Michael Brody-Waite didn’t think he was going to make it to his 25th birthday. Today, he’s an author, entrepreneur, and leadership coach preparing to deliver the keynote address at the AICPA & CIMA Employee Benefit Plans Conference in May.

In the address, he will share details of a leadership framework — using his experience as an addict in recovery as a backdrop. Three principles of the framework relate to authenticity, the ability to let go, and the importance of uncomfortable work.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• Why he says that most leaders are “addicted to doing.”
• The three principles of “addictive leadership.”
• The reasons, according to Brody-Waite, that those principles relate well to the accounting profession.
• Some of the excuses he made and others he blamed for his substance abuse.
• Why the advice “don’t be scared” should be avoided.
• The delegation lessons that can be taken from the principle of “surrendering the outcome.”
• Why uncomfortable work is different than hard work or difficult work.
• Brody-Waite’s message to conference attendees.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: Welcome to the Journal of Accountancy podcast. This is Neil Amato with the JofA. This episode is a conversation with the keynote speaker at the AICPA & CIMA Employee Benefit Plans Conference. His name is Michael Brody-Waite, and suffice it to say, he’s got a story to tell. I look forward to hearing that story, also sharing it with you, the listeners. Michael, thank you for being on the Journal of Accountancy podcast.

Michael Brody-Waite: Thanks for having me, Neil. I appreciate it, man.

Amato: We appreciate you making the time. This discussion is serving as a preview to your keynote address, May 6 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The title of the session is “Addictive Leadership,” or at least that’s the main part of the title. What does “addictive leadership” mean to you?

Brody-Waite: First of all, my background is as a recovering addict. I have been addicted to drugs, and I’ve also been in long-term recovery. And, in my experience, most leaders are addicted to doing, and I want to help them get addicted to leading.

Amato: Wow, yeah, I think that’s a really good start. It’s probably not the type of topic we talk about too much on this accounting-focused podcast and some of our conference keynote sessions. Maybe, if you could, tell me when exactly was it in your life, how many years ago, that you were an addict?

Brody-Waite: When I was 23 years old, I was hopelessly addicted to drugs. I was homeless. I’d been kicked out of college, I’ve been fired from my job, I’d been evicted from my home, my car had been repossessed. The only money I had was what I could steal from my friends, and I was throwing up blood. I pretty much believed that I would be dead by my 25th birthday.

I got an opportunity not everybody gets. I got to go to rehab. They taught me a process that changed my life. It helped me stay clean, now 22 years and running. But I think the reason that I’m speaking at the conference is it helped me in my career lead myself more effectively than most people, and that helped me become a corporate executive, an Inc. 500 founder, a nonprofit CEO, and now a leadership coach where I’ve had the great fortune and benefit to be able to coach over 30,000 leaders.

My organization has recently specialized in the accounting space because if you want to talk about a space that’s addicted to doing and has a challenge around leading these days, that’s the space. That’s why I’m there.

Amato: That’s great. Is this your first AICPA conference appearance?

Brody-Waite: Conference, yes. I’ve done other work with AICPA small groups, but first time for the conference.

Amato: Now, one of your contentions: CEOs should run their businesses like addicts. Tell me more about that.

Brody-Waite: Well, it’s actually meant to be a double entendre. I believe that a lot of leaders actually act like addicts in active addiction, where they’re addicted to saying yes to things that they should say no to. They’re addicted to hiding their weaknesses. They’re addicted to avoiding difficult conversations. That’s what I did, and that’s what kept me high, and that’s what kept me homeless.

What I see is the potential for leaders to meet the moment of the current leadership crisis, both in accounting, outside of accounting. When I say, “CEOs should run their organizations like addicts,” I know thousands of addicts in recovery. They operate in a very different way. They operate by three principles, practice rigorous authenticity, surrender the outcome, and do uncomfortable work, and they do it like their life depends on it. When they do that, they have utter and complete transformation, just as I did. What I have learned is you don’t have to be an addict to be able to benefit from that self-leadership process.

We’re talking about a self-leadership process that was created 100 years ago that has helped millions of people lead themselves out of one of the hardest circumstances a human being will ever find themselves in. That leadership process works in almost every country, in almost every language. I started to say, “Hey, can we apply the recovery process that saved my life and has saved millions of lives to leadership?” We got some really surprising results when we did that.

Amato: Let’s focus on each of those three tenets that you mentioned earlier. First, practice rigorous authenticity. How do you see that playing out? How does that play out with people who have addiction issues?

Brody-Waite: I could not practice rigorous authenticity; it’s what kept me in active addiction. That is being true to yourself in word and action in every moment and also being true to others. I wasn’t doing that. I was hiding my addiction. I was hiding my struggle. I was scared of what people would think if I were to ask for help. I had utter and complete denial that I even had a problem at times. Hey, you know what? I don’t have a drug addiction problem. The problem is my parents. The problem is my job. The problem is my girlfriend. I have trouble sleeping at night. I wasn’t given the instructions on how to deal with life and life’s terms.

Whatever it was, I blamed everybody except for myself, and it was almost the most painful experience in the world for me to just absolutely own the truth about who I was and where I was. My problem was, I didn’t know how to have difficult conversations. I didn’t know how to say no to drugs. I didn’t know how to feel comfortable in my own skin, and I was scared to tell anybody that truth.

When you think about leaders, even in the accounting space. So, let’s practice rigorous authenticity here. We have partners at firms that are working below their level. We have partners that aren’t doing business development and recruiting because they’re billing out at a really high rate, dropping into the work. They do it because they feel productive and they feel like it’s helpful, but a lot of it has to do with either they’re not practicing accountability with their directors and managers. Or it’s their comfort zone, and doing business development is uncomfortable. Or having conversations with clients or potential recruits is uncomfortable.

In general, the opportunity, I think, for leaders to practice rigorous authenticity and be honest about what’s holding us back from realizing our leadership potential is the very same challenge that keeps a drug addict high.

Amato: Then the next one, surrender the outcome. I have a hard time with saying, “Oh, well, we’ll just see how the chips fall.” I don’t know if that’s exactly what you mean, but it’s a let-go type of thing, I guess.

Brody-Waite: What we do is we tell people, “Hey, man, don’t be scared.” OK, well, why don’t I just fundamentally deny my humanity? That’s great. That’s really helpful. Most of us get that message early in our careers. Don’t be scared. We probably got that in our childhoods. Don’t be scared. We’re humans. Fight or flight is real. Fear is real. When we say surrender the outcome, what we’re specifically talking about is when I was in active addiction, the reason that I didn’t want to own my problem was I was scared of what other people would think of me if I actually told them I had a problem. I was also scared of what it meant if they said, we’re going to help you get help. I literally was terrified of spending an entire day without a drug in my body. That was terrifying to me. The outcome that I was scared of was, what does it look like if I come clean to everybody and I engage in the solution.

What I was taught was not to deny my fear. One of the things I was taught was, if you don’t own your fear, your fear will own you. I had to acknowledge my fear and learn to take action while not being as worried about the result. For leaders, like, a classic example of this is delegation. Like, delegation is so hard because we’re worried about what’s going to happen. Yes, maybe we can do it better, and maybe we can do it faster, and maybe the people that we hire will do it with an error or two. But if you have 10 direct reports, 10 people doing all the things is so much better than you doing all the things, yet so many leaders, when they actually think about letting their people make mistakes or do the thing and potentially risking upsetting the client as an example, it’s really scary.

What I see is a ton of leaders that aren’t leading to their full potential simply because, as leaders, the crazy thing is, we’re told we’re responsible for outcomes. We’re obsessed with outcomes. We carry the burden of the outcomes. I was just a drug addict that didn’t want to tell people that I had a drug problem, but think about a leader that’s actually carrying that burden? That’s insane. As a result, it’s hard for us to practice rigorous authenticity with ourselves. Hey, we should delegate as an example, we should whatever, because the outcome is so scary. Learning how to surrender that is the thing that really gets us moving in a direction to realizing our leadership potential.

Amato: The idea of “surrender” almost being a synonym for “delegate” is a really good one. I like that. I think a lot of people, both in accounting and just in the professional world, if they have direct reports, feel that.

Brody-Waite: Well, you know what’s interesting is all these things are pretty universal, but here’s the crazy thing about accounting. We’re at a crazy time with private equity, with talent challenges. You know, 75% of CPAs are going to retire in the next 15 years. That’s crazy. You think about succession planning, that’s crazy. Then you think about the promise of technology making everything better, and then actually it stresses everybody out. We’ve got all these external pressures being applied to an industry where most of the people that are leading firms and in leadership positions did not get to that position through the traditional trial by fire and training that leaders in corporate America do.

You get there by being really good at building your practice. You get there being really good at being able to build clients, networks, and master your craft. Then, in addition to that, we have these things called managing partners, which we say are CEOs, but they have to check with all the other partners whether they’re engaged or not, in like all the decisions that they make. In my observation, there’s such a huge opportunity in the accounting space where there’s so many external pressures, and I think people get really distracted by those, but there’s so much low-hanging fruit. If we could just surrender the outcome and learn how to lead more effectively, I think that we could respond to those challenges even more effectively.

Amato: That’s well said. The third point, do uncomfortable work. I think that can resonate with everyone, really, but how would you explain it?

Brody-Waite: Do uncomfortable work. A lot of times, people will say after they see me speak, they’ll come back to me like, I love it, do the hard work. I’m like, nope. They’re like, do the difficult work. I’m like, nope. They’re like, do the smart work. I’m like, nope.

It’s amazing how much humans, especially leaders, want to deny that emotions affect them. I specifically say “uncomfortable work” because I’m talking about the work that we get scared to do, and fear is an emotion, and emotion triggers physical discomfort in our solar plexus. It’s literally the tightness in your stomach when you have to have a difficult conversation with a co-worker or with a direct report or with a client or whatever.

When I talk about that, I’m talking about uncomfortable work because here’s the thing, and this is something that we teach a lot. Most of us were taught how to do hard work. Historically, physical — put in the hours. Most of us were taught how to do smart work. We do all kinds of leadership trainings and read all kinds of books on how to do everything more effectively. But very few of us learned how to do uncomfortable work, and that’s because hard work is physical, smart work is intellectual, but uncomfortable work is emotional, and that is something that most people don’t want to talk about. But how many times have you seen someone doing eight hours of hard work because they were avoiding five minutes of uncomfortable work?

Amato: Definitely seen it. Definitely lived it.

Brody-Waite: I still live it. I’m not fully recovered, as we say in the recovery community, and I’m not fully recovered as a leader either.

Amato: I guess related to this is a concept that I read about briefly on your site, the concept of living mask-free. Can you explain a little more about that?

Brody-Waite: Sure. When I was writing my book, Great Leaders Live Like Drug Addicts, I wanted to develop a mental construct for what it meant when we were not practicing rigorous authenticity. One of the things that I’ve learned in the recovery community was we put on masks in order to assimilate, in order to be accepted, in order to be liked, in order to get what we want, in order to hide things that we think other people won’t like. That’s like someone saying, “How’s your day?,” and you’re crying inside, and you’re like everything is fine, everything’s great. Literally, your face looks like a mask.

I wanted to just be able to make it really clear what it looks like when we’re not practicing these principles. I came up with the concept of mask-free. That’s in my book, but I will tell you, I made a huge error that I could not have foreseen. In my book, I outline an entire program called the mask-free program, where I teach people how to use these principles and leadership. I published that book in May of 2020, which was the height of the pandemic, and everybody was all PO’d about masks. I was getting death threats online. People thought I was getting political.

Amato: Because that was your title.

Brody-Waite: Yes, because I was talking about the mask-free program. People thought I was on the pandemic. I would get these messages, “I’m going to kill you,” because they thought I was being political. I’d be like, no, I’m talking about leaders practicing rigorous authenticity and leadership. And I kid you not. people would go from “I’m going to kill you” to “Can you send your book to my boss?”

Some crazy people online can be reasoned with. But it was this whole idea of if drug addicts are full of drugs, and I think leaders wear tons of masks, what does recovery look like? For me, it’s drug-free, so for leaders, it’s mask-free. At some point, we transitioned over to the concept of addictive leadership because we found that that was less confusing than the masks.

Amato: There’s something that says a Marky Mark song should be mentioned here. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the line, but there’s a drug-free part in a Marky Mark song.

Brody-Waite: Yes. I think it’s in “Good Vibrations.”

Amato: Exactly. The mask-free and your timing — your timing in May 2020 could have been a little bit better, but clearly you still got that message through to people. I really appreciate learning more about your story. One question I would like to ask, and it’s a tough one, is: All those people that you may have blamed back 20-plus years ago, have they let you back into their lives?

Brody-Waite: Part of the recovery process is making amends, and that’s cleaning up your side of the street. When I had to go make my amends, it’s crazy. It’s like, a sponsor asks you, did you hurt people, and you’re like, “Yeah, I totally did.” Then it’s like, here’s a piece of paper, and write down every single person that you’ve ever hurt and how you hurt them. That’s practicing rigorous authenticity.

It’s called searching and fearless inventory, and all of a sudden, your challenge gets real. We see the same thing with leaders. They’ll be like, I struggle with time management or whatever or delegation, but they never really do that rigorous inventory. When I did that inventory, it helped me understand just the full impact of my addiction and just how I’d not just hurt myself, I’d hurt so many other people.

Then at some point in the recovery process, I had to make a list of people that I had to make amends to, and then I had to go make amends to them. Some of those people were people that had wronged me, and they hadn’t cleaned up their side of the street. One of the things that I learned was, I had to surrender the outcome when I go to make amends. My job is to clean up my side of the street. It’s just about that, and I had to give up whatever their response was. I had this fear that so many people were going to shut the door on me, hang up the phone, yell at me, make fun of me, say, “I don’t take the fact that you’re in recovery serious,” because so many people relapse.

I had those fears so present, but I’m really fortunate. All the people I made amends to, except for maybe one person that I wasn’t that close to, let me back in. They saw that I was living differently.

The reason that we call them amends instead of apologies is you have to work the steps prior to that, so you can amend who you are and amend your behavior. When you make that apology, it’s sincere, and then you try to make it right by amending it as well. I was living differently, and people could see that, and so they let me back in. Then I actually got things like jobs. Who would have thought a drug addict employee without a college degree? It’s crazy.

Amato: It seems like it’s working out, and you’re helping others now, too. Michael, we really appreciate having you on the JofA podcast. Anything you’d like to add as a closing thought?

Brody-Waite: Just if you’re in Vegas, please come see me and come talk to me after because I’m going to talk about leadership. But also, most of the people in the audience will have a loved one that’s an addict. I’m going to talk at the end and offer some resources on how you can help those people, too, because that’s one of the reasons that I carry this message. I’m not just in this to help leaders. I want to carry a message that extends to all my people in recovery, but also carry the hope that an addict can recover to all those that are in active addiction, impacted by it.

Amato: We will have a link in the show notes to the conference agenda page, the registration page. So again, people can get the information on this keynote and this conference. Michael Brody-Waite, thank you very much.

Brody-Waite: Thanks, Neil.