Ep 342: Nils Leonard - 'An Uncommon Leader'

Here’s a question. Who do you really want to join you on the ride? 

This week’s guest is Nils Leonard. He’s one of the co-founders of Uncommon London. They describe themselves as a creative studio building brands that people in the real world actually wish existed.

Nils has been on the show before. He was one of my early guests on the podcast and that conversation came in the early days of Uncommon and he was very open about his ambitions and his expectations for himself and his company. 

Four years on and it’s hard to see the gaps between what he said back then and how he talks about the company today. 

In my experience - both as a company founder and as a coach - there is one aspect of leadership that brings many to their emotional knees.

Firing someone. 

When to acknowledge that the fit between the person and the organization doesn’t work.

On a human level, we all want to belong and the fear - conscious or instinctive - that we might one day be on the receiving end of this conversation, makes many leaders do everything they can to avoid that moment. The one in which we say out loud, to someone’s face, we don’t want you. 

Even now, as you’re listening, if you hit pause and say out loud, we don’t want you, there will be a feeling in your stomach that you hope goes away fast.

But there are three other parts of this that don’t get enough weight in the emotional wrestling match.

First are the hopes, needs and expectations of all the people that work for you who are contributing so much that they will never be part of a conversation like this. Whose talent and efforts and commitment to you and to the business are subsidizing the person who doesn’t fit.

Second are the needs of the organization as a whole, which has no agency and no ability to help itself, and which is as reliant on your protection and care as an infant.

And third is the person who is receiving this news. Who knows, in almost every instance in my experience, that this job isn’t a fit, that these people are not their tribe and that they are, to use Nils’ description, a passenger on someone’s else’s ride.

“Death twitches my ear. Live, he says I'm coming.”    

They say that life is a journey. And so is building a business.

Who gets to go on that ride is perhaps the most important decision that a leader takes.