Episode 25 - Why “Being Managed” Feels Awful (And What Great Leaders Do Instead)

Have you ever worked for someone who knew your numbers… but didn’t know you?

They knew your deadlines, KPIs, and calendar — but not what it cost you to keep producing. And at some point, you stop feeling supported and start feeling watched.

In this episode of Just Human, Jay Boykin sits down with John R. Miles (author of Passion Struck) to unpack the difference between being managed and being seen accurately — and why “mattering” is the foundation of performance, loyalty, and psychological safety at work.

You’ll learn:

• Why micromanagement vs leadership feels so different in the body
• How performance culture quietly erodes self-worth and work performance
• What it means to build “self-mattering” before you can feel seen by others
• Why frontline managers are the hidden engine of engagement (or disengagement)
• A practical leadership shift: “eyes on, hands off” + commander’s intent
• How great workplaces connect roles to mission so people feel valued — not measured

If you’re a leader, founder, or manager who wants high performance without grinding people down — this conversation will change how you run 1:1s, how you give feedback, and how you build culture people don’t want to leave.

💡 One takeaway to try this week: start noticing the “yellow doors” — the small moments where a micro-choice can increase trust, connection, and energy on your team.

👉 Learn more about Jay’s work: www.jayboykin.com
📘 Learn more about John: John R. Miles | Official Website of the Award-Winning Author

#leadership #micromanagement #employeeengagement #workplaceculture #psychologicalsafety #leadershipdevelopment #highperformers #burnout #trust #purpose #management #communication #justhuman #passionstruck

Transcript

Jay Boykin (00:00.546)
Have you ever worked for someone who knew your numbers, but they didn't know you? They knew your deadlines, they knew your KPIs, even your calendar, but they didn't know what it cost you to keep producing. They didn't know what was confusing. They didn't even know what you were carrying. And at some point, you really stop feeling supported and you just start feeling watched. And today,

We are talking about the difference between being managed and being seen and not in a flattering way, not in that you're amazing kind of scene. I'm talking about being seen accurately because you know, when you see someone accurate, it really does something that management tools can't. It changes performance, it changes loyalty and it changes how safe people feel

in bringing the truth. And so we are going to get into that right now.

Jay Boykin (01:19.928)
Well, welcome to Just Human. And in this space, we have honest conversations about what it takes to lead and to build in today's world. And we explore the intersection of business and leadership and personal growth. We talk about the practical stuff. We talk about the human stuff. Because success is not just what you build. It's who you become while you are building it. I'm Jay Boykin.

I'm your host and I thank you so much for listening. We are available everywhere that you can get great podcasts and also available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music. And today's conversation is for leaders, for founders, for managers who want high performance without grinding people down. And...

It's also for high performers who feel like they're always being evaluated but rarely understood. And my guest on the show today is a former Navy officer, a speaker, and the author of a book that's titled Passion Struck, which we are gonna talk about today. John, thank you for being here. How are you?

John Miles (02:35.629)
Hey, Jay, I am awesome. So grateful to be on your show.

Jay Boykin (02:39.499)
Now we're really glad to have you here. And I really wanna jump right in and ask you this. When you hear the phrase being seen, there are people out there that may eye roll at that. But from your perspective, this obviously means a lot to you because you wrote a book about it. What does this mean to you?

John Miles (03:06.043)
Yeah, I think when we think of the term mattering, what tends to gravitate towards people's minds is connectivity, connectedness, the relational aspect of it. But I contend that mattering starts someplace else. I believe that feeling seen starts with self-matter.

It starts in what I call the human operating system that each one of us has and in the quadrants that govern our lives. And that in order to have connection or to have meaning, they both sit upon a foundation of mattering. mattering is that state. I call it of being passion struck, it's, it's, you have a mattering project.

in your life that fills you up. And as a result of that, you feel seen within your own existence.

And that's what allows you to then feel seen by others. But what ends up happening in so many in the environments that we are in is we're now living in a modern system that takes the systems integrity that we have and it keeps trying to strip that self mattering away from us. And so over time, I call this the slow fade that feeling of being seen

slowly evaporates until so many of us feel invisible in our own lives. That's certainly what happened to me during a very successful career externally, but internally I became the vanished aspect of myself.

Jay Boykin (05:08.258)
So that's interesting, John, you talk about, I'd love if you elaborated a little bit on what you were experiencing, but when you talk about self-mattering, put a little bit of meat on that bone for me, for my listeners, help us to understand exactly what you mean by that.

John Miles (05:31.131)
So in order for us to feel like we matter to someone else,

John Miles (05:39.568)
we have to have an inherent sense of our worth. But what ends up happening for so many of us is that worth gets hollowed out by different things. Some of it starts with how we were raised. I mean, it absolutely makes sense on what side of the railroad tracks you're born on. For some of us, we're born into families where our sense of self

was taught to be invisible. what brought meaning and attention was when your voice didn't count.

In more modern society, we have many more of the lawnmower parents or the helicopter parents where they're absorbing performance. You're absorbing the performance culture that they're putting on you because your worth is now based on what you're achieving. Either way, they're both causing you to lose your visibility to the world around

And that's what I mean by what personal mattering or self-matter really is, that foundation. And so many of us, it starts eroding from the earliest days. And then what ends up happening is we go into school systems that after here in the United States, after we started putting new policies in for no one left behind, et cetera, they were all anchored on raids.

and performance scores and other things. So we start tying this conditional worth to all these things that are external to us. And then we go into the work environments where ever since the industrial revolution, everything has been governed by metrics. So we measure

John Miles (07:45.584)
You know, we measure everything from customer satisfaction to shareholder value to this and that, but people start being treated as metrics rather than human beings. And then we wonder why are 70 % of people worldwide disengaged. It's because that core sense of self keeps being evaporated through the conditional of value of worth that

the systems around us keep trying to take away from that foundational sense of mattering that we have. Hopefully that makes sense to you.

Jay Boykin (08:23.394)
That really does. I'm gonna share something a little bit more personal and see if I'm really tracking with what you're talking about. But I think about in my household when I was a child for my brother and myself, it was a good thing for us to really be as invisible as possible. know, dad.

worked really hard and when he came home, you know, it was, it was in our best interest to sort of give him his space. And so it was a good night if, you know, we were invisible. And then as I translate into my early school years, you know, I was going to a lot of schools where there weren't a lot of kids who looked like me and

So I was standing out for all of these reasons that maybe I didn't want to. And so even there, I was trying to be invisible. And so when I get to my career, I found myself at times trying to stay invisible in that arena as well.

until I realized that that wasn't gonna work in terms of any sort of career progression. So does that sort of track with what you're talking about in terms of the self-mattering where, you know, I'm sort of putting this on myself in the beginning where I'm trying to be invisible, let alone worried about anybody else seeing me.

John Miles (10:09.915)
Yeah, so I think you gave a good description of this. I'm gonna just parallel your life with my life. So I grew up in a family where my father had a really rough upbringing in urban Detroit, had a very blue collar upbringing, didn't have a lot of money. And he kind of learned that his inherent worth

was based on producing, being the breadwinner. So for him, he thought he was showing his worth and his love to us by being a constant provider. But what it ended up doing to the family is he was on the road, he was in sales, probably 250 days a year. And so I rarely saw him, but when I did see him, for many of my developmental years, he had a drinking issue.

And I remember he would come home, pour himself a couple of Manhattan's and, by the time eight 30 rolled around, he was asleep. So even when he was home, he wasn't present. And that's what so many of us are doing today in our lives. You know, people drink this away. They have other addictions to cope with this. Um, but similar to you, I grew up looking different.

Um, not for the same reasons, but because when I was five years old, um, I was pushed from behind playing tag and went head first through a basement window and had a traumatic brain injury and it changed everything for me. So, um, I woke up in the hospital with a tube in my head, still have a scar from it and, um, life changed. I developed, um, an eye disorder called Ampliopoeia and had to wear a patch for years.

Jay Boykin (11:49.538)
wow.

John Miles (12:07.535)
I had a speech impediment, so words didn't sound correct. And my mind, I had sensory processing deficiencies, so I couldn't remember things. And then my mind was operating on a different speed than my words were. And so I felt like you did. I felt this, like an alien around these normal kids, like an outsider. And when you feel like that, I'm not sure if this is how you felt, Jay. I mean, you can just...

feel without them saying a word how they're thinking about you. And I remember for me, while they were in their normal English class, I had to walk across a field to go see a speech therapist. And I could just feel the stares of them judging me as I'm walking across this field and just wishing there was a way for me to completely evaporate so I wouldn't have to do that walk of shame.

And it's part of the reason why I know we're talking about passion struck, but I have another book coming out called you matter Luma, which I'll put up here in February for kids, because what I'm trying to show them just as we're talking here is that mattering should never be something we have to earn later in life. Like we're talking about here, it should be anchored early before the structures rise and the questions emerge.

that so many of us carry forward as a foundation and we end up trying to repair later on in our lives. So I think what you are explaining in your own life and what I'm trying to make real for people too is what does that self mattering should look like and why so many of us don't feel it because it is evaporated almost like dystemia, dystemia if anyone's ever experienced it.

kind of like a low-grade depression that happens over time, that you don't even know the phase is happening until it accumulates.

Jay Boykin (14:17.774)
Wow, John, that is super powerful and I really appreciate you sharing your experiences from your upbringing and from your childhood. Let me ask you this. So, you know, how did you and how can someone who is listening, who may be struggling with their self-mattering, what are some of the things that we can begin to

to work on in order to begin to feel that within ourselves. And then we'll talk about what that means externally.

John Miles (14:59.611)
So one thing that I think is important is that meaning and mattering are two different things, but they're closely related and they kind of depend on each other. I believe mattering is the foundation on which meaning resides. But you mentioned my book, Passionstruck, earlier and this is something that I try to tackle in the first chapter. I call it the mission angler principle, but I think where so many of us

are going wrong in our lives is we get conditioned as we've been talking to, to live a life that we feel we should be living or the career that we should be having. And a lot of that comes from how we were raised. I I was raised with very high expectations from my grandparents and from my parents on what I was supposed to become. I mean, my grandmother,

would constantly tell me how disappointed she was in my mom, that my mom's sister became this highfalutin attorney and my mom was a school teacher and she had not achieved her potential and that she expected more out of me. And that's where the conditioning begins. So we end up falling in this trap of becoming someone who is completely different from who we are inside.

And I was interviewing a brilliant philosopher, Rebecca Goldstein, recently. She has a brand new book out called The Mattering Instinct, and we were talking about this. And what ends up happening is for so many of us, we don't have our mattering projects. And when you don't have your personal mattering project,

those who are listening probably feel it because you feel unearthed. You feel like you're in complete misalignment with your internal GPS. And that's because we're going down this track that self-discrepancy theory calls the state of living in the should instead of living in the could. And so what I try to orient people to do to answer your question, Jay, is we need to become mission anglers in our own life.

John Miles (17:24.729)
And I use this term angler to describe a fisherman. I live down here in Tampa Bay, Florida, where we are in some probably the best fishing area in the world. And I know a lot of people who love to fish and these anglers are like, it is their mattering project. They, they think about it for weeks in advance. They are planning their day. They're going to go out.

what time they're gonna leave, where the fish are, what's in season, what the currents are, what the moon phase is, et cetera, et cetera. They don't just go haphazardly out there thinking that they're gonna point the boat in any direction, go out 20 miles and think they're gonna catch fish. But that's exactly how so many of us are living, the latter example of that. We become so conditioned to live in this state that we think we should be living.

And then we reach that state and then there's so much momentum behind it that it's as if we're standing on Mount Everest and we're looking at Mount Kilimanjaro thousands of miles away. And we know that's where we want to be, but we have no idea how we can get there because the barriers we have built up are so great that we don't even take the next step to try to get there.

And that is exactly where this whole concept of crossing that gap between the life so many of us feel we should be living compared to what we could be living exists. And that's really the first step is really taking off your mask. That's been built up from all these conditioned years of living the life you feel like you should have, where all it's really doing is it's...

basically covering up all the superpowers you exist. And those superpowers aren't being used in the way that you were born to apply them. Because I think God has a mission for all of us that we are uniquely are supposed to serve humanity in a way that only we and our superpowers enable us to do. But when we live in this state where we're covering up those superpowers, we never, we never

John Miles (19:49.497)
reach the state where we're deploying them, if that makes sense.

Jay Boykin (19:56.459)
It does make sense. It does make sense. So, you know, what's interesting about what you just said, John, and I think about it. I use, when I speak, I talk a lot about Legos. I tend to take props with me when I speak. And I talk about the fact that I tell the story about my son who, when he was eight years old, he got the...

Star Wars Imperial Star Destroyer Lego kit that was, you know, a couple thousand pieces, which was huge for a kid of eight at that time. And, you know, for me, the accountant, you know, the plan was is that, okay, we're going to build this exactly the way that the instructions are telling us to build it. My son,

poured all of the pieces into one big pile and he built what he wanted to build. And I think about what you said where many of us are living a life that someone else designed for us, expectations that other people placed on us. And it's like following the instructions of the Lego kit. Nothing wrong with that, but...

Sometimes that's not what we want. And it's not until we begin to do some things a little bit differently, put some things in places that the instructions don't really call for that we can begin to experience the life that you're talking about and the life that we're called to lead. you know, I think that what you're talking about, you know, with the anglers is very, very powerful.

John Miles (21:51.204)
And you asked me earlier on, like, how did I discover this? Well, the answer is very painfully. And I think we're best positioned to serve the person we once were. And for those who know nothing about me, I had reached a state where I was a C-level in a Fortune 50 company, one of the most recognized companies

that's out there. And I was utterly miserable.

everyone would look at me and they would see the house and the cars and everything around me and think I had it all. But when people ask me, why did you leave that all behind to do what you're doing now?

They're baffled because people get so caught up in the money and the possessions and all that. But what was hitting me was I was investing every ounce of me for the betterment of a company while I was hollowing out the very aspects of my life that mattered. It was like I was living on a stool.

that had five legs on it, but the one that was getting all the weight was the constant busyness, which was leading to stress. And in every other aspect of my life, my physical health, my emotional health, my relationships were completely unraveling. And so I ask people, like, is the cost worth it? Is it worth you losing your soul?

John Miles (23:42.107)
for what you're gaining in that environment. the answer to me was no.

because I had so put myself behind this mask of pretense that I had forgotten what life looked like without it. And when I finally started to spend some time, it took me a few years to recalibrate my human operating system and to work on that state of self-mattering. Once you see the life that you were living in,

once you start doing the repair, I guarantee you, you're gonna look at it say, how in the heck did I allow myself to get there? Because it doesn't, I don't care how much money you're making. If you're absolutely miserable doing it, is the price worth it?

Jay Boykin (24:36.366)
100%. And it's so amazing how many people that I have spoken to that say things that are very similar to that. So John, I want to ask you this. So obviously there's a foundational aspect for each of us as individuals to...

focus on ourself and ourself mattering and there's a value system that goes around that. But now for my people that are listening that are leaders, they are leading teams, they are managing people, what are some things that they can try to focus on that can help individuals on their team feel

more seen and feel like they matter in those environments.

John Miles (25:39.792)
Yeah, Jay, thank you for bringing that up. I think it's always good to talk about other scenarios so that people can see what other companies are doing that are excelling. So I am not sure if you have ever been to Ann Arbor, Michigan. Have you?

Jay Boykin (26:00.535)
I have not.

John Miles (26:03.394)
Ann Arbor, my parents and grandparents all went to the University of Michigan, so we've spent a lot of time there. And in 1982, there a deli started there called Zingermans. And the owners of it wanted it to become the best Jewish deli in the state of Michigan.

And what's interesting when you look at that environment is they will bring in new employees and for their orientation, typically you would think in a setting like this, it's going to be talking about the company core values and expectations and stuff like that. But in this deli, what they ask their employees on their first day is, what is your mattering project? They don't ask it in that words, but they ask, you know, what

brings you fulfillment? What makes you flourish as a human? What excites you? What are the things that you love to do? And then the owner of the company goes around and asks the different new employees that, and then he too starts having that conversation. This is what makes me matter. And employees walk away from this crying because they've never been in an environment

that's like this. So the thing here that I people to understand is the environments that I have been in

We don't put enough emphasis on frontline supervisors, frontline managers and their energy levels. I recently wrote an article for a CEO magazine on return on energy. And this is really about mattering. So in these companies, and I was part of them too, you have these top-down strategies that all of us are probably.

John Miles (28:10.843)
Well, what happens up happening is a huge loss of translation ends up happening between the CEO or head of HR or whoever trying to explain this to the EVPs, then down to the SVPs, then down to the VPs, then down, you know, cascading to the point that, you know, the frontline worker has no idea how their role impacts that strategy at all. And

I was in Lowe's home improvement in this situation where I took over a function that had the lowest employee engagement score in the entire company. And the reason I found it to be the case is because the employees, every single one of them had lost their self-mattering sense

in the organization because none of them understood how their job related to the bigger 50,000 foot picture that these strategies were trying to contain. And where I'm going with this with the frontline managers is I'll never forget this. Like we went through all of these training sessions where I would bring in not just my direct reports, but every supervisor in the organization. And I think I did four or five of these to instill in them.

what the corporate strategies were, but I translated them into this is how we in our unit are achieving that strategy by what we're doing. And I remember one of my operational watch managers came up to me and he wanted me to basically micromanage how he was leading his group. And I said to him, I go, you're on a 24

by seven watch that rotates. And so a great majority of the time you're working when I'm not even awake. So for me to have the operational understanding of what's happening while you're doing your job is impossible. What I want from you is I want your input. I mean, you know what's happening with these employees. You know what we're trying to achieve.

John Miles (30:41.839)
and I'm looking for your ideas to close the gap. But I don't think that that's how we often treat our supervisors. And we're not measuring their energy levels because if they're depleted, if they don't feel like they matter, if they don't understand how they're contributing, if people aren't reinforcing it, then their energy level is gonna get depleted. And if their energy level is depleted,

guess what happens next? The employees underneath them are going to be depleted too. And so I think that that's a layer that so many people forget about. And just to make this real, when I think about a company like Chick-fil-A and I look at their success, one of the things that I think differentiates them is that, first of all, they don't call their store managers

franchisees, call them operators. But they ask for input from those operators and they treat those operators as the most important member of the ecosystem because that's where the customer lives. And so their whole model is based on how do you empower that operator to create the greatest community within their store and then engage the community

outside of that store so that both of them feel that they're seen, heard, and valued. And I think that's one of the reasons why when you go to a Chick-fil-A you see the lines are 50 cars long is because they not only give their operators the supporting infrastructure, but they're constantly asking for their input on how they can make the system better. So one...

they're being told they're seen, but then they feel that felt sense back because they're able to contribute and add value to the bigger organization. And in a nutshell, that's what I'm trying to convey here, is it kind of starts with self-mattering, but once that energy level is built within you as a self, you then can ripple it out towards others. And then when you ripple it out towards others, you get it relationally.

John Miles (33:08.207)
back and that's when connection happens. And this is what exactly is missing in so many of the systems and environments and companies that we exist in.

Jay Boykin (33:20.224)
John, I feel like you are affirming something that I have also written. I want to take a moment first to mention that this episode is brought to you by the Aligned Impact Financial Leadership Program. We are helping small business leaders scale with confidence. Is your business leaving profit on the table? If you're guessing on your margins,

you're losing money. True financial leadership isn't about the spreadsheets, it's about clarity. And I created the Aligned Impact Program to give you that clarity. So if you wanna learn more on how you can bring that type of decision making and clarity to your business, check it out at jboykin.com. You know, what's interesting, and we're talking to John Miles here, and John, I wrote something,

that is so connected to what you said. And I call it the just human philosophy. And it's something that I'm writing about in my own book. And I talk about these three pillars of connection. There's connection to self, there's connection to others, and then there's connection to a shared purpose.

And what you just articulated with the Chick-fil-A example is 100 % aligned with that connection to a shared purpose that, you know, if individuals don't understand where they fit in the big picture, you know, they don't want to just read a slogan up on the wall. They want to understand how their job connects to the...

the bigger picture and I apologize, I've got a camera issue here but fortunately I've got another one. But it doesn't matter what your role is, if you are a custodian all the way up to a chief executive in a company, if you don't understand where you fit in that ecosystem,

Jay Boykin (35:33.486)
you're not gonna do your best work. You just can't do your best work if you don't understand where you fit.

And I want to ask you next, John, about in your book, Passion Struck, you talk about these 12 steps to unlocking an intentional life. you mentioned the mention angler, mission angler, but you've got some really interesting creative names for some of these other steps. Can you?

You don't have to go through all of them, but elaborate on a few of those and tell the listeners what you mean by some of those.

John Miles (36:19.733)
So another one that I get asked about a lot is something called the mosquito auditor. People tend to always gravitate towards that one and it's funny because it's one of those chapters that I thought would perform the worst. But what I was trying to gravitate towards here is the way I wrote Passionstruck was through my own me search. So

I ended up going out and studying tons of people. Some were professional athletes, some were CEOs of companies, some were well-known actors or actresses, and then I looked at common people. And what I was trying to figure out is like, what makes a passion struck life? And I found 12 of them that seemed to be used by all of these luminaries that I examined.

But it's one thing to see it work for someone else. It's another thing to see it work in your own life. So I spent two years doing me search, applying them to me. And I found that depending on where you come at this from, that there's an order to them. And so it kind of starts with the mission angler. And then once you define a problem that's worth solving, the next thing you typically confront is fear.

So the next one is fear-confrontor. And once you start addressing your fears, the next thing you're gonna confront are the environments and the people who are kinda gonna steer your way either towards where you wanna go or away from it. And this is where the mosquito auditor takes place. So as I was trying to think of how do I frame this chapter, I happened to be listening to a radio show who asked the simple question, what is the most dangerous animal?

planet. And you already know where it's going because the name of the chapter is Mosquito Auditor. But when I first heard this, I thought like many, it's a shark or a dangerous jellyfish that they have down in Australia or could be a spider or something else. But most of us wouldn't have guessed the mosquito, yet they take over a million lives per year. And they do it in such a

Jay Boykin (38:27.874)
Right.

John Miles (38:43.695)
and invisible way. And yet this is how so many of the environments that are around us, that the people around us alter our lives in negative ways and our behaviors in negative ways. So I was trying to give the reader a way to recognize these because the thing you do on the other side of this is you put boundaries in place to stop these from happening. So I identify

mosquitoes in this chapter. One of them is the invisible suffocator, another one is the blood sucker, and another one is the pain in the ass. So the blood sucker is someone that we probably all have seen in our lives, and that is that the person we may work with or could be someone in our life who we know who wants to suck all our blood for their personal gain.

And this also can be environments that we put ourselves into that are sucking all our energy away from the things that matter most, like that Fortune 50 environment was doing to me. The invisible suffocator are those people in our lives who, I'm sure Jay, you have seen this, you tell them you have this wonderful idea, I'm gonna start this great podcast that I'm doing. And all they can tell you is how much work it's gonna take.

how difficult it's gonna be to get guests, how much money it's gonna cost you, and they give you a million reasons why you shouldn't do it. And I'm sure so many of us have run into those people as well. And then there the pain in the asses. And I remember at one point in my life, I was the CEO of the real estate company, BiOwner. And for a while in order to be the CEO, I felt like I better become a realtor and figure out what that job entails.

Jay Boykin (40:20.565)
absolutely.

John Miles (40:38.875)
And what I found from a lot of our customers is you have maybe 20 houses that you have on the market, but the pain in the ass is the one who thinks that there is the only house that you're working on and they should be the only thing that you're focused on. For many of us, it's the customer who wants all your attention, but maybe they're only 2 % of your profit as an analogy.

But once you start recognizing these people in these environments, the important thing is you can start putting boundaries that protect you. And so that's what the whole principle was about, was giving people a lens that if you take a simple archery example and you start looking at who are the five people in my inner life, or what are the five things that I'm spending most of my calendar on, and then you start applying this lens.

What are you finding? And then go to the next five and the next five. And if you want to get to that new mission that the mission angler is calling you to do, then you're going to need to either put a boundary in place or eradicate these things from your path or else you're going to end up where you were.

John Miles (42:03.995)
So that's one. And then from there, I continue down this arc. But one of the ones that I like to talk about for business people, and I was talking to Daniel Coyle about this earlier today, actually. People don't know Daniel. He's a bestselling author. He's got a great new book out called Flourish. But we were talking about

that the communities that we put ourselves into, and a work environment is a very good example of this, we often think that we're gonna come into this environment and that it is just going to welcome us and absorb us without us having to be intentional about making our mark in it. And this could be a church community, it could be any type of community, it could be toastmasters, anything that you're pouring yourself into.

The point of this is

I look at communities like I look at work environments. They're kind of like gardens. And a garden is something that you have to cultivate. It's not something that you just walk into as a leader and think that even if you've been there a long time, that it's gonna cultivate itself on its own. Yet that's what so many of us do. We just think that with art out being intentional, that these things are just gonna shift in the way that we want them to without us

Jay Boykin (43:15.629)
Right?

John Miles (43:37.186)
exerting ourselves into them. And so one of my favorite chapters was influenced by General Stammer-Crystal and my friend Keith Crotch, who people don't know who Keith is. He's the former CEO of DocuSign, a former assistant secretary of state. And what we were talking about, the three of us, was this idea of eyes on, hands off leadership.

For so much of my career, what I learned in the military was to be a servant leader. And it really served me well for a while. But the conditions in so many of our companies have shifted. There's so many things now that are impacting the environments that I don't think servant leadership alone is enough. What I think we need to be is gardener leaders. And this is where Eyes On Hands Off leadership really comes in. Because in this environment,

Jay Boykin (44:33.037)
was hoping this was gonna be the one that you were talking about. So please, sorry to cut you off. Keep going.

John Miles (44:38.757)
Because in these environments, we need to look at them like they're gardens. And in a garden, there's the hands-off component, or there's the eyes-on and there's the hands-off component. And my analogy here is as a gardener, if you're planting crops, you've got to plant the seeds, you've got to toil the earth, you've got to make sure that it's getting enough water.

But outside of that, once you put the conditions in place, a lot of this, there's nothing you can do about it. mean, nature is going to take hold. But what we try to do in companies is we micromanage these very employees who are underneath us. And this is where that story that I told in Lowe's comes back. Like if I'm trying to micromanage everything that that computer operator supervisor was doing,

Jay Boykin (45:32.877)
Thank you.

John Miles (45:36.796)
I am not only giving them the strategy, giving them the commander's intent, everything else, I'm doing their job for them without letting them express their own sense of flourishing into it. And what a gardener leader would do differently, think about this as maybe a ranger team or a SEAL team that's on deployment.

Jay Boykin (45:40.533)
Okay.

John Miles (46:05.433)
look at Stammer-Crystal as the head of operations in Afghanistan. If he has a team doing a mission, he can give them the commander's intent. He can tell them what needs to be done. He can give them all the instruction that they need. But if he's sitting there in the United States trying to govern what they're doing on the battlefield and trying to micromanage it, what do you think is going to happen?

I mean, it's going to create absurdity. But the way he led was he was eyes on, but he was hands off. He trusted those operators were going to get the job done based on the intent and the training that he had given them. And that's what a Gardner leader does. You set up the conditions for your employees to excel, but you've got to entrust them

and their return on energy, you gotta amplify that, but you gotta trust that they're going to take the commander's intent and they're going to, they're gonna conquer that mission. Now that doesn't mean that you don't go back and you mend to the crops because you have to do that, but you don't do it in such a micromanaging way that you're controlling everything that they do because you absolutely want their input

and their individuality to influence the conditions of the environments that they're in. But so many of us do not allow the employees to do that.

Jay Boykin (47:43.109)
John, have you read the book, and I'm asking this because you've got a military background, but have you read the book Turn the Ship Around by L. David Marquet?

John Miles (47:56.284)
Yes, David. Yes, he's a, like me, he's a Naval Academy grad. I thought you were gonna go to It's My Ship, which is another great book.

Jay Boykin (47:58.287)
Yeah.

Jay Boykin (48:06.956)
I'll have to put that one on the list. But yeah, I loved that book by David and, you know, it's a, yeah, he's a submarine captain and he inherited by all metrics in the Navy, the worst boat in the fleet. you know, in his time as captain in a very short period of time, he turned it into by,

John Miles (48:14.203)
It's actually submarine, isn't it?

Jay Boykin (48:35.7)
same measures, the best boat in the fleet. it talks about, know, sort of what you're alluding to is that he would talk about giving what he intended to do, but giving the space for the people under his command to think and to flourish in the areas that they were responsible for. as opposed to him just sitting around giving orders,

the entire time, he would talk about what the intent was and allow them to take the initiative. So there there seemed to be some really good parallels there with with what you were saying.

John Miles (49:19.899)
That's a great book. And I just want to talk about this for a second because I gave that, I have given some previous examples, but if you look at this from a Lowe's standpoint, Lowe's has like 1800 stores, lots of them. And each one of those, like you're mentioning with turn the ship around, it's kind of like it's individual ship. They each have a couple hundred employees and

Jay Boykin (49:31.822)
Right.

John Miles (49:49.466)
What I have found, because I probably visited four or 500 stores during my time at Lowe's, I would often go with this guy named Larry Stone, who was a legend. Larry had started as a mail clerk, and by this point, he had become president and chief operating officer of Lowe's. It took him 40 years, practically. But you would walk into a store with him,

Jay Boykin (49:57.007)
that I'm kind of hilarious at, who is hilarious, and sick, and ill, and fine, but at this point, it's the health of the president.

Jay Boykin (50:16.782)
Okay.

John Miles (50:19.991)
And within five minutes, he would understand if it was a well-performing store or a poorly performing store. And I would ask him, like, where's the first place that you see it? And he would say, I see it in the eyes and faces of the store associates, in the way that they're carrying themselves. And then I see it in the pride that they have in how the store is set up and how they're greeting customers.

Jay Boykin (50:20.014)
And find this. Keep that in mind before you go.

John Miles (50:49.167)
and how much care they're putting into it. And there's so much any of us can learn from all of these stories because that's exactly it. It's the same difference of why you go into one McDonald's and you have a completely different experience from another or one Home Depot compared to another. It's completely based on the commander's intent within that store that they're in.

Jay Boykin (50:54.318)
And from all of these books, as an academic, think it is difference of my personal experience with the place I'm from.

Jay Boykin (51:09.422)
Yeah, wow. John, as we start to wrap this up, one thing I want you to, I'm putting you on the spot a little bit here, but for those folks that are listening who may want to

John Miles (51:17.699)
Same thing why one school runs differently from another.

Jay Boykin (51:37.94)
implement one thing new this week? We're not going to give them 10 things, not even five. What is one thing that our listeners can try to focus on this week that really aligns with what we've been talking about today?

John Miles (51:58.522)
I think what most of us get wrong about making any change that we have in life is we tend to think it has to be something grandiose. And I'll go back to that example I gave of trying to go from Mount Everest to Mount Kilimanjaro. You're never going to get there in one fell swoop. And I think if you look at what Elon Musk has done, whether you like him or disdain him,

He has perfected something that I call the B-internal effect because he he grasps almost better than anyone I know the long-term vision of a sea tortoise because his mission is to save humanity from itself. But the way he does this is he does it through the tiny actions that make up his day. And he does these typically in five to 10 minute blocks.

So one of the things that I have really learned is that our lives are dependent upon the tiny micro choices that each one of us make. And we tend to gravitate towards the big moments in life. And we don't spend enough time in what I call the transition points, these tiny cues that come about in our days where we have an opportunity that we

that we can enact our sense of presence on another that we often just ignore. And I think there's this great researcher named Lisa Miller who talks about different doors. And so many of us get stuck by red doors and we miss the yellow doors. And I would encourage listeners to look for these yellow doors.

Jay Boykin (53:42.927)
So, going go over some of the things that we've to find a way to do this at the end of day. Now, we first need to look at the data for the data-gap opportunities and all the places that we've set up in data-gap. And then, we need to look at the personal life of the person who's trying to achieve this. And then, we're going we're set up the data-gap.

John Miles (53:54.268)
that are giving you opportunities in small micro changes that you can make to change your trajectory, whether that's in your personal life or you're just trying to make a change in your company, because that's where everything starts and ends, is when we start being more like the worker bee and we focus on the small micro movements that we can make to make the hive better.

Jay Boykin (54:17.29)
Love it, love it. John, tell people where they can find your book, both of your books.

John Miles (54:23.215)
Yeah, so if you're interested in pre-ordering Umatter Luma, you can do it at Barnes & Noble or you can go to umatterluma.com. And if you're interested in PassionStruck, you can go to passionstruck.com.

Jay Boykin (54:25.898)
and you can the data spot.

Jay Boykin (54:38.102)
Amazing and where can people find you via social or your website?

John Miles (54:45.781)
best place to find me is John, my middle initial R miles. Am I LES?

Jay Boykin (54:54.392)
Well John, it was amazing to have you here on this episode today. And for those of you that are listening, I know that you have lots of choices. I appreciate your time. If you found this meaningful, I would love it if you would leave some comments, hit the subscribe button. If there's someone that you know that you think that this message would resonate with, send it to them, share it with them, and

and let them get some of this amazing information that we got out of John. John, I appreciate your time and hope to talk to you again soon. We'll have you back on the show here, you know, and we'll talk about something else here soon. Thanks so much. And everybody, thank you for being a part of Just Human. And until next time, I want you to continue to be kind to yourself and let's keep growing.

John Miles (55:41.691)
Jay, awesome to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

John Miles (56:13.052)
Hey Jay, I just wanted to let you know probably three quarters.