Margaret Moore: The Science of Leadership Based on 50 Years of Research

Episode recap: 

Today’s guest is Margaret Morre, MBA, co-author of The Science of Leadership: Nine Ways to Expand Your Impact. Margaret and Marcel discussed the translation of scientific research into practical leadership practices and the nine key leadership capacities. They explored concepts such as conscious leadership, mindfulness, and the "quiet ego," while examining specific leadership qualities and the importance of maintaining healthy relationships and fostering forgiveness in the workplace. The discussion concluded with conversations about shared leadership, the role of AI in leadership development, and the concept of love as an action in leadership contexts. 

Bio:

Margaret Moore, MBA, blends leadership, coaching, and science, including thirty years in C-suite roles, co-leading four successful start-ups in biotechnology and coaching, and two decades of professional coaching and coach training. For 25 years, she has been a prolific translator of science into coaching, training, and leadership practice. Margaret's vision for this book is to help bring scientists, leaders, and coaches together to foster leadership excellence and support everyday leaders far and wide.

Quotes: 

• "Leadership is the highest expression of human endeavor. It’s a calling, a legacy." 
• "The more whole you are, the more you feel like you’re flying instead of trudging uphill." 
• "A relationship is a cycle of back and forth, empathy and compassion. The more relational leaders are, the more they can be influential." 

Takeaways: 

• Reflect on your leadership: Are you developing capacities at the self, relational, and systemic levels? 
• Practice conscious leadership by cultivating presence and integrating your fears into strengths. 
• Build trust and influence by focusing on relationships, empathy, and forgiveness—not just transactions. 
• Embrace shared leadership by engaging people at all levels in vision, strategy, and implementation. 
• Take responsibility for shaping technology (like AI) with intention, values, and accountability. 
• Pause regularly to assess what your team or organization needs—compassion, agility, or a new perspective. 

Timestamps: 

[00:00] Introduction and the cost of poor leadership   

[00:04] The science behind effective leadership   

[03:43] Margaret Moore’s background and approach to translating research   

[10:00] The nine leadership capacities and their organization   

[12:41] Self, other, and systems-oriented leadership   

[13:21] Conscious leadership and the quiet ego   

[18:07] Example of conscious leadership: Astronaut Sunita Williams   

[20:23] Relational leadership and the importance of trust   

[34:21] The rise of AI and the need for responsible leadership   

[40:07] Leading with love and values   

[43:07] The power of pausing and choosing the right leadership approach   

[44:48] Closing thoughts and resources 

Conclusion: 

Strong leadership today requires a blend of self-awareness, relational intelligence, and systemic thinking. Moving beyond rigid, top-down models allows leaders to create cultures of trust, meaning, and adaptability. The most effective leaders are those who continually grow, model their values, and choose the right approach for each moment. Real change starts with those who lead by example, shaping not just organizations, but the future of leadership itself. 

Transcript

Marcel Schwantes  00:04 

Hey guys, welcome back. Got another great show for you. So hey, let's get right to it. Okay, you know that I like stats, so here's a grim one. In the United States alone, poor leadership costs organizations up to 360 billion annually due to low engagement, productivity and high turnover. Okay, so these are things we've been talking about on the show for years now, and yet, despite all of these decades of research on what makes a strong and effective leader, most of it really is, isn't seen by people at the highest level, by decision makers, because they're buried in the literature. And so when they do see it, it's kind of disjointed, it, they don't get the full picture. So what I know about leadership today, man, I'm telling you, especially after the pandemic, it's harder than ever. Okay, we have hybrid and remote settings, and people are some of some of the people back in the office, and they don't want to be back in the office. Leadership is hard. It's complex. It's it can be overwhelming and really stressful. So that's why I'm excited about this new book that came across my desk. It's called The Science of Leadership, Nine Ways to Expand Your Impact, just released in July, and the authors are executive coaches, Jeffrey Hull and Margaret Moore. And what they did is they translated over 50 years of research, the stuff that we may never see buried in the literature into this comprehensive guide for seasoned and aspiring leaders alike. So what they did is they boiled down the findings from more than 15,000 scientific studies and articles across 22 countries into these nine easy to understand leadership capacities. Now, I know that we have talked about some of these leadership capacities in the past, but let me tell you, it bears repeating, because it's so important that we grow ourselves in into these kind of leaders that that exhibit these capacities, that practice these day to day behaviors and practices right and really make you into the kind of leader that you aspire to be in this day and age. And I'm thrilled that one of the co-authors, Margaret Moore, has agreed to share her findings in today's episode. So a little bit about Margaret. She blends leadership, coaching, and science, including 30 years in C-suite roles, co-leading four successful startups in biotechnology and coaching, and two decades of professional coaching and coach training. I could probably use her for my own practice for 25 years. Margaret has been a prolific translator of science into coaching, training, and leadership practice. Her vision for this book is to help bring scientists, leaders, and coaches together to foster leadership excellence and support everyday leaders like you, and finally join us. Margaret, welcome to the Love in Action podcast. Yes, it's great to be here. I love being here. Yeah, we appreciate you being here as well. We're gonna have fun with this way, so we start like this. You ready? What's your story? 

Margaret Moore  03:43 

Well, I, in college, loved chemistry. You know, a lot of people don't like chemistry, but I really like chemistry because I'm the periodic table and the idea that there are a set of elements that come together to form every structure in our in our world. And my first career was in biotechnology. So I spent 17 years in four countries, working with scientists and physicians and managing research and development as an MBA, okay, so I might both of my husband's not at the same time are scientists. So I, I really appreciate the complexity, but also the simplicity of, you know, the natural world. And I think we've overcomplicated psychological concepts, social sciences, and leadership. It feels to me like a jumble, yeah, like it's a list, shopping list. And so I've been working on a structure of element, elements of the mind and in well being and coaching. And so we had a framework to start with, and we've been reading a lot of so I went. I went when I went to MBA school in Canada, 40 years ago, there was no science of leadership. It was strategy, strategy, competitive strategy. Michael Porter, that's what we which I love, too. I think so strategy and science are kind of key points here and and as I've been touching on the leadership science and coaching science. I mean, I just read a lot of papers and I write translations, which means I spend, I've done 100 of them for the Institute of coaching. So that means I spend time, you know, hours with a paper, which takes, it's almost like writing a book, yeah, a meta-analysis, and then try to find the gem and then get it out to people. It's just something I love to do. I not many people like to translate science like that, but I really enjoy that and then organizing it for other people to use. Science works. You stand on the ground. It doesn't slip, you know, you ask a question about high-quality motivation. It lights people up. You ask the question about what you know, what you don't, and how inspiration works for you. And you already know the structure of inspiration, what it takes, and how it rolls out. You already know you have all this understanding. And so every everything you talk about as a leader or coach lands and you because you have this depth and breadth of understanding the science. So I also think that we have millions and millions of leaders, and none of us have access to this amazing body of literature over the last 40 years. I mean, it's just not out there. There are textbooks for business school, but even then, there really is only one, and it's not written for everybody, so it was just a lot of work, but an honor, yeah? Not just translate one thing or here and there, but to actually look at the whole thing, lay it all out, reorganize it so that things were in sections like inspirational leadership, visionary leadership, transformation, leadership are all together, yeah, yeah. And, you know, we put psychological safety and trust and forgiveness and listening with relational, you know, we so we, we, we put things together in a way that they then, you know, instead of all the overlap and duplication you could, you could understand the essence, yeah, these elements, and then understand all the the molecule that each one creates, yeah, well, let's get into that a little bit. And you know, I'm thinking sifting through 50 years of research is a daunting task in itself. But then you were like, Okay, we got all of this data, all these data points. Let's put them into buckets, right? And then let's figure out which ones fall under more individual leadership behaviors versus leading others. And then, and then, looking pulling back to the systemic level, how did you get to, like, sifting through all that? How did you break it all down into those parts, yeah, so, well, I've been collecting these topics for a good long time, so there wasn't and leadership is, it's not divorced from well being. It's just a higher expression of human well-being. You know, we don't put them together very well, but creativity improves well-being. 

Empathy improves well-being, managing your emotions and integrating them into strength improves well-being. So the leadership repertoire is they're different from the well-being literature. But what's really cool about right now is that we're beyond having one study, two studies on a topic. There are 212 studies in a review on humility, and there are 180-odd studies on psychological safety. So what we're now doing is looking at review articles. That's why we got to 15,000, we didn't read 15,000 papers. We read about 400 but those in turn analyze hundreds. Okay? And so when you get to a stage of maturity of a scientific discipline where there are 200 studies on humility and leadership, or authenticity, or authentic leadership, then you're at a place where you've got signals through the noise, and because work in the social sciences, research is hard to reproduce, it's it. You know, if you just put one study out, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to stand the test of time. So we're, we're well beyond that. We had a couple of places where we sprinkled in a study or two to add a twist, but for the most part, you go to the high-quality journals, the best journals, and you look for the latest reviews, mostly in the last five to seven years. So we, you know, we didn't have to look very far. And then there's a review article of all the topics of leadership. Yeah, doubt. So you look at that and say, Okay, did we cover them all? Oh, we missed that one or this one? Oh, okay, let's see if we can find it. So, you're sort of coming at it from a few ways. So it wasn't. 

Marcel Schwantes  10:00 

You know, it wasn't impossible, it was doable. Okay, so all of this research, as I mentioned in my introduction, you were able to distill it into nine leadership capacities, and I'd love to drill down to maybe a few of them. And for the sake of time, I actually picked out three. 

Okay, so the three are conscious, conscious leadership, relational and shared leadership. But before we start to dig into those, let's talk a little bit about the importance of distinguishing between what you put, you put them into buckets: self-oriented leadership, other-oriented leadership, and systems-oriented leadership. So why is that important that we know that so? So why is being a leader extremely challenging? I mean, it's tough is that you're managing yourself. You're leading yourself. We all have to do that, whether you're a leader or not, and then you're influencing others— you know, those you can touch, those who are directly close to you. 

Margaret Moore  11:15 

But the real differentiator for leaders, because we all have others in our lives that we're trying to influence, whether we're leaders or not, but the big thing is the system leadership, where you're not touching people, where you're sending ripples out. And those ripples have to go way beyond your reach, yeah, and then, if you think about there being like nine different capacities, they all operate at all three levels. I mean, we organize them, but they still do. You know, you want everybody to be conscious, you want everybody to be agile, you want everybody to be compassionate. You know that they all operate, so just a lot to keep track of, yeah, and you know, you're operating at self-awareness, other, and meta and system all the time. You're going up and down sideways, you know, 360, across all these capacities, it requires a level of agility, which is why agile leadership is a really important concept that most people don't have to accomplish. Most people don't have to track and monitor and think and think strategically about all those things almost simultaneously. And that's why leading is so hard and we really need to. It's the highest expression of human endeavor. Yeah, it's a calling. It's a big calling, and it's a legacy. It really is a, you know, it's a privilege to have the role of influencing others in the system and actually leading, generating. 

Marcel Schwantes  12:41 

Okay, so under the self-oriented level of leadership, I picked out conscious leadership. So let's talk a little bit about, is there a good definition for conscious conscious leadership? Well, again, we reorganize things. So right now, conscious leadership, if you know conscious capitalism, is more about virtue and him, humanity, and saving the world. But that's not what consciousness means. So we put those things into authenticity where it's value, where the fire, you know, the passion, the values, the love. That's where love lives. 

Margaret Moore  13:21 

Yeah, consciousness is actually being awake and present to what's really going on. And it's very difficult to do that because the human brain, like AI, is constantly on, and your brain is predicting from all the inputs, internal and external, how you're going to do in the next moment. And then it sends emotions to tell you how things are going, which then you turn into thoughts. And now you have a dizzying amount of activity in your frontal cortex. And your brain is not designed to perceive reality directly. You have to turn it off. You have to move your virtual reality off so you're actually present in the moment. And that is, I mean, that's mindfulness 10.0. Yeah, it's to be that awake, that you actually see things as they are, and what gets in the way, because leadership is so hard, and because we have to project this confident, you know, competent, optimistic. We're going somewhere. We're going to get there. You have further to fall, the higher you rise. So the fears don't go away until you integrate them, until you turn them into strength, which is the natural process of the mind that you have. We have to speed up as leaders, or we cannot rise up further, because the strain is just too much. So you, Wow. So we have to turn the fear, the anxiety, that turns that, that expresses an overdrive. And, you know, you're electric, right? When you're working too hard, you're pushing too hard, you're edgy, you're, you know, you're impatient, you're irritated, you're depressed. You know, all that stuff is just Shadow stuff, right? And leader. Don't have the luxury of just expressing it. We actually have to deal with it and turn it into something. So at the moment, we need to set it aside, and then when we're not leading, we need to deal with it, move it to growth, which so the shadow is a particular kind of shadow, because it's related to the fear of failing, and then it, but it, but the great thing about it is that it just points you where you need to grow. Wherever you're stressed is exactly where you need to shift your perspectives. Yeah. And if you just keep following the strain and stress, you will eventually get stronger, and things will be easier. And that's the message of the book. The more whole you are, the more you feel like you're flying instead of trudging uphill. Yeah, yeah, we need more flying leaders. Okay, so another term that I only found out by reading your book is what the researchers are calling the quiet ego. What is it and how? Yeah, yeah. It's a new construct from Jack Bauer and Heidi Waymont, and they're working on another book. There's not a lot yet in the leadership literature about it. It's kind of an advanced form of mindfulness, but it's more than mindfulness. It's a level of maturity where you're not self-absorbed. You're not constantly thinking about yourself, your title, you know, you are taking good care of yourself, but equally, you give the same love and attention to others. It's a balance. It's this nice 50/50, balance. Yeah, and the more. And then when you're in that place and when you're in this present space, transformation happens faster, too, because you're just balanced, you know, you're not self-absorbed, and so it's a place we all want to get to. You know, we might not get there till our deathbeds, but get quieting the ego. I mean, one metaphor I use, Marcel, is thinking of your ego as a dog and a nice dog. You know, it barks sometimes when there's nothing to bark at doesn't accept things as they are. You know, it's arguing with the moon, barking at the moon. But you know, your ego is like a dog, and it needs to be well-trained. Because you either have a part of you that is above your ego. You know your ego is a structure that is really valuable and very important, but it's your charm, and it's your uniqueness, and it's your identity and all that stuff. But you have to imagine it more like a dog than all of you. And when you and then it has to be on a leash, it has to be well trained. And so a quiet ego is someone who knows how to do that. Yeah, their ego on a leash, have it smile and wag its tail when the time is right. 

Marcel Schwantes  18:07 

Do you have a good story for somebody that just is a clear-cut example of a conscious leader? 

Margaret Moore  18:15 

Oh my gosh, you know? So I had this wonderful opportunity. The video is not yet, but I had an opportunity to have an interview with the astronaut, Sunita Williams, who was on the Starliner and stuck up in space with her partner, Butch, for nine months. You know, their capsule was damaged, and in that process, she was appointed as the Commander of the Space Station. So she actually got it, as it wasn't her first time as commander, and that had to be approved by the Russians, the Europeans, the Canadians, and the Japanese. So she built a lot of relationships. She even lived in Russia for a while. So she and I look forward to people watching the interview and seeing her in action, she is so beyond her ego, mm, and so intelligent. You know, they're basically scientists up there. Yeah, they're all, everything they do is highly sophisticated engineering and science, and then there's this warmth, like she would hang out in the dinner area at night because they didn't really eat together, except on Friday nights when they had karaoke and stuff with the, you know, all the cultures. And she would, and just, she would just stay there and see how people were, and just check in and ask them, you know, how are you doing? Are you okay? You know. And people had issues, you know, somebody at home, and then the resilience and crisis. I mean, they're trained, they're they're they're they they're they die and are reborn many times with all the training as astronauts. But she's really quite something, um, really something to see a servant leader. But her way of being was also transformational for the people around her, but it's possible to have the engineering, you know, what you typically think is the masculine side and the feminine side completely integrated, and that's a really good you know, it's you can be brilliant, but if you have brilliant and you wrap it in genuine, warm love. 

Marcel Schwantes  20:23 

You don't reduce your standards of excellence at all. Yeah, you don't. You don't soften your toughness at all. But when you add this warmth and love around the strength and the fear of ferocity you that is, I think, the quiet ego, yeah, yeah, okay, speaking of warmth and love coupled with strength and ferocity, that perfect balance, I want to jump now to relational leadership, which falls in your book, in the area of other oriented so much of what the research points out points To in your book, has to do with building trust, right? I mean, obviously, you have to be relational in nature as a leader if you want to develop trust with your peers, coworkers, and all of your stakeholders. So, I'm curious, though. I know about listening, psychological safety, and all those things because I coach and teach them myself. But what would you say came up as, like, really obvious, as specific, like leadership areas under relational? 

Margaret Moore  21:54 

Yeah, well, I think we need to really shine a light on relationship work, because we talk about these concepts like trust and empathy as if they're like individual, little things that we do when the whole purpose is to have a relationship, and a relationship is a cycle of back and forth, empathy, and compassion. I understand you, you understand me. The more relational leaders are, the more they can be influential, and this idea that you know on your deathbed you will forget all your work relationships is not true. I mean, it's BS, because our work relationships, I'm sure you would agree, Marcel, are some of our most precious relationships and and so moving from the transactional nature of business to a relational and focusing on relationships with everybody, your customers, your stakeholders, then you understand them and and that you relate to them, and then you can influence them. So it's the precondition for influence, yeah, because they trust you understand them and that you have their back, even if you fire them — and that happens. I mean, I had to fire someone early on in my coaching career who was, I won't go into it, but, and we, we continued on as friends, you know, because there was clearly something not working, and that's how you do that. You know, if you can handle it that way, where the relationship is not harmed, when you fire someone, then you've got, you get what it means to have a relationship. Something rarely talked about in leadership conversations, especially in the business world, is the practice of forgiveness. Touch on that a little bit, because that came up in the researchers. Yeah, so there's not 100 studies on forgiveness and leadership. Let me start there. There's a handful. Um, but there's a handful. And so what happens is that there's a topic in well-being, like psychological safety or self-efficacy, or high-quality motivation or optimism, or, you know, etc, meaning that work that comes out of the well-being positive psychology research, and then what happens is the leadership folks start to think, well, how does this work? At work, turns out so So forgiveness, and you've got, I'm sure you can relate to this. People don't forgive easily at work. So you know, it's you know, in your personal life, you sort of have to, because you've got close family who are going to do things that are going to not be in your best interest. And if you want to have a relationship, you just going to have to forgive them. I mean, it's just a help way, a healthy way to navigate life is to understand people aren't perfect, and they're not really trying. You know, it's just what it is. But at work, we hold grudges, right? You know, like that person did that to me and this person, you know, and and it's very hard to forgive, so it's so it's it's critical a good relationship is defined by the ability to forgive. Forgive, yes and move on, not to forget, not to pretend it never happened, you still have to heal yourself. I mean, it's, but the forgiveness is, you know, you know this. It's about you. It's about you. You benefit when you forgive somebody, because you can move on. Yeah, just to hold a grudge, which is a really good form of shadow that definitely gets in the way. 

Marcel Schwantes  25:25 

Okay, so I'm thinking, let's close out the relational with a good story. Can you think of someone that maybe overcame their own shadows to become really good relational leader?

Margaret Moore  25:46 

Yeah, I mean, the main, I won't, I won't actually get into it's a scientist type, but folks who are strong on mental activity, analysis, research, those networks, neural networks, are the thinking networks. If you think about Mars breaks, the thinking is like, Oh, actually, I have a better example. Are directly mutually exclusive with empathy. So, so physicians and scientists are in their thinking networks, and so, the thing you have to do to help them move into relational is to pause and move their minds down to their heart area and start there when they are greeting somebody, and when you start here. So you're not thinking, you're just hey, Marcel, how are you? I'm not thinking about all the things that we need to talk about. I am pausing to just be a human being in Coheed, you know, sort of resonating with another human being, yeah, yeah. And when you build the thinking process on top of that, then they're connected, and you're synced up here, and then now you're synced up here too, yeah, collaborative, collaboration, going on the thinking and at the heart level, that's real collaboration. And so that's the, that's probably the practice that that I I use most often with a very cognitive types, because you have to stop yourself from thinking and shift down, or you just drive over people, yeah, through them. So, yeah. So that's the, that's a different, it's a different set of networks. It creates the need for agility. It's polarized, because on one hand, I'm feeling you. On the other hand, we're thinking together, but there's a great brain chart. It's not in the book, but Shelly Carson, my neuroscientist friend, built all these brain charts of different states that we worked on. We have a model on this. And when you get the empathy and the thinking on top of it, the entire brain of both people lights up everything, as opposed to just up here, and then, then you don't have the synchrony. So, yeah, that's that would be my best way of explaining how up someone who's heavy on thinking and light on.

Marcel Schwantes  28:10 

 Yeah, okay. The last area I want to cover is that of shared leadership, which now we're pulling back, because this falls in the systemic, oriented level, right? So how would you define shared leadership in your own words? 

Margaret Moore  28:35 

So it goes against the grain, because the grain throughout the industrial era is that vision, strategy, and purpose are defined on top and then filtered down. And shared strategies is shared leadership is the opposite. You're engaging people so in a two-way process before you land on them, which doesn't matter whether you're talking about purpose, vision, strategy, or even implementation, but implementation, people do better at sharing the process of coming, arriving at, and how we're going to implement this. But in the strategy world, there's a concept called Open strategy, and there's a very good paper on this. You probably remember in the book of a CEO of a 50,000-employee insurance company in Europe, he arrived with stock price imploding and pressure for a quick turnaround, and they took the time to screen 40 people on the front line, like literally talking to customers. So six layers between the CEO and these folks to engage in the strategic plan, and it took four months of group meetings, and they were failing for the longest time because the folks on the ground had never talked to a CEO before, and the CEO really didn't know their language, and so they just were not they weren't talking in the same they the folks on the ground weren't thinking big picture, and you couldn't translate what they were saying into strategy. But they got their trial and error painful process, and a third of the strategic plan came from the frontline folks, and the company's valuation went up by $18 billion so that's a beautiful example of what can happen, but it's a huge amount of work to bridge the gap between your C suite, complex thinking, sort of ritual rummels, you know, distill the crux out of a messy situation. And you need to be really smart. You need to know a lot. You have to have these multiple levels of thinking to get to that strategy. Now you're trying to help other people do that. So I think this is so important. It's the hardest one. It's the one where we all meet to score the lowest on because you have to, you have to get out of your own bubble and really relate to people who have no, just don't have the same, you know, way of thinking about things you do. So it's, it's very hard, but it is, to me, the main thing that's missing in engagement. You know, we talk about engagement in lots of different ways, but if people are engaged in creating any of those, vision, purpose, strategy, then they're engaged, yeah, yeah. And they're engaged, you know? And that's real engagement. So, so I think, I think that's the that's the hardest one, because you're coaching, you're teaching, you're training, you're, you know, you, I mean, when you really just want HR to create a program and like, go to go do it and teach them how to do this, you know, then you're not getting there, right? So it's this ability to, and not everybody has it, but it's the ability of a few people in an organization to bridge the language barrier and actually bring people up to a level where they can contribute. 

Marcel Schwantes  32:03 

Yeah, I always also see it as a way to get away from the leader-follower model to the leader-leader model. By sharing your leadership, you're actually building other people to become leaders themselves. So it's kind of a paying forward. 

Margaret Moore  32:22 

Because if you're going to share your leadership, I would assume that other people are benefiting from your leadership, and it's helping them to raise their own capacities to lead well, whether they want to become a manager or not. That's not. The point is to lead themselves well and help to help them, to lead others around them. Well, if that makes sense, exactly, yeah, it's modeling, and it's the ultimate in leadership, because everything you do needs to move from self to other to system. Yeah, you're sharing transformation, you're sharing servant, you're sharing compassion, you're sharing relational, you're sharing agile, you're sharing all of it, and you're aware of, you know, is the organization not agile enough? Is it not compassionate enough to all of the forces that are at stake here? Is it? You know, not purposeful enough? There's not enough heart and love in what we do. You know, you have to have a sense of where you're at and where you need to dial up, yeah, modeling, which is another big part of this. It's hard to get at the science around this because it's very fragmented, but it's definitely part of transformational leadership. The modeling of leadership is actually a big part of what you do; to share it is that you, whatever you do, you are a role model. Everything you write, everything you say, every process you start, everything you do, you're modeling and people are going to copy you or criticize you and and that's, that's a that's a tall that's a lot of strain on you, right to know that everything you're doing, yeah, as a consequence beyond yourself. You can't just, you know, you just can't go to sleep at the wheel, right, right? To be awake in every moment and on about the impact of what you're doing on others. 

Marcel Schwantes  34:21 

Okay? So speaking of well, being awake. We are awake to the reality that artificial intelligence is here, and it is still in its infancy. We don't even know the enormous potential and the problems that might arise due to AI. So let's take AI and put this, fit this into the leadership conversation. All right, so whether it's now, but especially, I mean, I don't know where this thing is going. Margaret, so three years from now, five years from now, how will leaders be able to navigate the rise of AI? 

Margaret Moore  35:00 

Yeah, well, I mean, I think we first have to promote ourselves to be the being the leaders of AI. I mean, you get this sense that AI is just like, leading itself and like, but what happened here? Aren't we leading? Who's the lead? Who's in control, who's leading here? I think people need to promote themselves to being leaders. I mean, I'm really serious about that. Yeah, read everything every day, and you'd think there are no leaders. There's just all followers and observers. Liz, right, so first thing is, we need to lead, and we need to shape it. It's like a child. It's not conscious. It has a brain that's just getting better and better. But it's like a child, it's not very grown up. It's going to do what we train it to do. It may do things like kids grow up and do things you have no control over. So there's, you know, we don't know when it grows up, what it's going to do, but, but we're still the parents and the bosses and the leaders here, so I think we, we need to be way, way more responsible and accountable for how we're using AI and what its impact is, you know, we can't just say, well, sorry, we have a million people that work for us and 100,000 I think we're going to go, Well, what are Those 1000 going to do? And what exactly, you know, it's a bit like polluting the river and going, whoops, Oh, we didn't know that the chemical waste was going to kill the fish. You know, we just have to start being responsible about the consequences of what we're doing and also shaping it the way we want to. So it's really all about leadership, right? And, you know? And, I mean, I think if you, there are a lot of unknowns, and I'm thinking about this a lot, and how to, how to use what we know, you know, just if, even if you just give AI the science of leadership book, and you say, everything you give me put through this lens, you're going to get higher quality output, because the science shows that character and relationships and compassion all lead to better performance. Okay, so we need to feed AI with what we want to get out. Yeah, and right now, it's being fed by the whole world of human activity, which is a pretty mixed bag, right, right? So, I think we have ways to shape it, to train it. We have ways to test it. We need to be thinking about the consequences. You know, this is all about leadership, really. And, if you just take the nine capacities and ask questions, you can even train AI to ask all those questions, you know, is this good for this? Is it good for that? And how am I, you know, how is it going to turn that so? So I, I intentionally focus on how AI can uplift humans, because AI can, like, like, just take the science of leadership book. We can't train millions of leaders on that book. I could build another school. But what AI could? AI can do all kinds of things we can't do that are better as long as we shape it. So I think it has huge potential for making things better. And like a dog, it needs to be on a leash. It does have a plug, right? It depends on energy from, you know, the electrical sources, so we can unplug it. We have to remember, we control the plug, so I think we really need to be way more accountable, responsible, and way more. 

Marcel Schwantes  38:39 

Proactive, right, in shaping it? Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, but especially you posted, and I'm paraphrasing what I consider the existential question of, are we leading AI, or is AI leading us? Because I do see so many people being led by AI. They're delegating all their decision-making to AI instead of the other way around. So good question for us to think about, we're the conscious ones. 

Margaret Moore  39:09 

AI is not conscious. It can't tell the truth to the extent that the human skin, we have a lot that's in the way, but it can't discern, it can't judge, it can't discern. I mean, that's why that's so interesting, is because all of our mental activity that creates the leadership shadows, we know what that feels like, right? We know how it gets in the way. That's all AI is, yeah, is mental activity. It's not truth, it's not consciousness, it's not, it's not the physics of, you know, whatever the physics of our minds and our relationships, you know, the thing, how the two brains in relationship sync up, in terms of brain activity, heart rate, sync up. That's all consciousness. And that isn't an AI. Right? And we definitely think that's why I think waking up is the point. 

Marcel Schwantes  40:07 

Hey, it's been a great conversation. And so we bring it home with two questions, as we do with every guest. Okay, here they are. The first one is the love question, I always have to say with a manly voice, Margaret, the love question, because people think that this is a warm and fuzzy show. Well, yes, there are elements of warmth and fuzziness. But you know, we talk about love as a verb, not as a fuzzy emotion. So here's the question, how do we lead with actionable, practical, loving, loving care. Dig in and day out, I'm going to come back to Jack Bauer and the quiet ego, because his book on the transformative self uses the term love to describe one of four quadrants of well-being, which means that humans have values. It's our fire things that are important to us, probably comes a good amount of hardwired, some socially installed, and it's the feeling, it's their feeler, like we care about things we're wired to care, and we care when we value something. 

Margaret Moore  41:18 

We fulfill that value through meaning. We do things that are meaningful in order to fulfill our values. So love is loving things that are valuable. Things are valuable. You love them because they're valuable. You care about them. And so in every moment, one can set an intention and remind oneself what I care about right now. What do I really want? What matters to me? What will make me feel good? What's important here, you know, and if you stop and start every conversation and say, What is it that I want to accomplish? What do I care about? That's love. It's the enactment of your values to create meaning, which is, you know, it's just another word for me, what's meaningful? Your relationships are meaningful. You love someone because they mean a lot to you. So it's all about values and meaning. And it comes from our fire, from our, you know, in that we call it like the eye care, in the in the in the personality, family. It's autonomy. It's our torch. Yeah, torch for what our legacy. It's bigger than business. It's more about, you know, how am I leaving things better? What's important? So that's what it is. Yes, don't even need to use the term. But Jack does use the term love because he thinks work is an enactment of, you know, our values, and fulfilling of our values. And that's love, whether it's relationships or work. So you're on, you're on track. It's a much bigger idea than love. It's actually, it's actually the our why, yeah, it's our why.  

Marcel Schwantes  42:57 

Yeah, that's good. That's good. All right, bring us home. What's that one thing you'd like us to take away from this whole conversation? 

Margaret Moore  43:07 

The important thing is that these nine capacities give you multiple ways to and multiple ways to mix and match in any given moment. So in mindfulness, we talk about the pause. You know, to pause. I think that the invitation is to realize that there are many different ways you can navigate the next task, and if you simply lean back to pause and say, What do I need? What does this group need right now? Do they need compassion? Do they need agility? Do they need a real good poke to get them out of there, eject them out of their rut? You know? Do we need to wake up? What? What's needed here? So I think realizing that you have the ability to step back and choose among many different approaches in any given moment is then you're awake, you're not bored, because you don't know what's going to happen next. You don't know what the right thing is, and you're always adapting, adjusting. So I think I would start there. Well, put the book again. It is called The Science of Leadership: Nine Ways to Expand Your Impact. 

Marcel Schwantes

There it is. If you're watching on YouTube, get it wherever books are sold. Margaret, if people want to connect with you, find out more about you, what you do, where can they go? 

Margaret Moore

The best place is at LinkedIn. LinkedIn coach Meg and then my partner, Jeff Hull, which we didn't get a chance to talk a lot about all of his coaching stories, but he's at LinkedIn. Jeffrey Hull. 

Marcel Schwantes  44:48 

It's been a blast hanging out with you. Thank you so much for your presence, your awakeness. Well, gang, you can keep the conversation going, as I always tell you, by using the hashtag on social media, #loveinactionpodcast, so use that. And don't forget, on my website, you'll have the show notes. You'll have the YouTube link to watch us if you prefer that mode. And all of that can be found at marcelschwantes.com for Margaret Moore and yours truly. Remember, in the end, love wins. We'll see you next time.