Today, we’re diving into a conversation that’s as refreshing as an ice-cold lemonade on a hot summer day! We’re talking about fear-based leadership, and our amazing guest, Kate Lowry, has written the playbook on how to not just survive but thrive in these often chaotic environments. Kate shares her own experiences navigating the tricky waters of Silicon Valley, plus some golden nuggets of wisdom about how to build a solid relationship with yourself, because, let’s face it, you can’t lead others if you’re not leading yourself first! We chat about the common traits of fear-based leaders—spoiler alert: they’re more predictable than a cat chasing a laser pointer—and how to use that to your advantage. So, if you’re feeling like you’re tiptoeing through a minefield at work, fear not! This episode is packed with practical strategies to help you reclaim your power and keep your spirits high. Let’s get into it!

Takeaways:

• In today's episode, we explored how fear-based leadership can manifest in various settings, from corporate environments to personal relationships, highlighting the importance of understanding its dynamics.
• Kate emphasized the significance of building a relationship with oneself, encouraging listeners to listen to their inner voice and discover what energizes them.
• We learned that fear-based leaders often use chaos as a control tactic, making it crucial for employees to understand their strategies to protect their own well-being.
• Kate shared practical tools from her book, including the idea of negotiating in bad faith and framing requests in a way that aligns with the leader's motivations, ensuring your needs are met.
• The discussion delved into the emotional immaturity of fear-based leaders, who often lack empathy, making it vital for those in the workforce to develop their own resilience strategies.
• Finally, Kate's insights remind us that while fear-based leadership is prevalent, fostering kindness and collaboration can be powerful tools for navigating and transforming toxic environments.

Links referenced in this episode:

• Kate Lowry
• KateLowry.Substack.com
• Scaleheart Co.
• amazon.com
• barnesandnoble.com

Mentioned in this episode:

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Welcome to Trailblazers and Titans, the show where we dive deep into the minds of those who challenge the status quo and redefine leadership.

I am your host, Keith Haney, and today I'm joined by someone who's not only navigated the elite corridors of Silicon Valley, but has also written a playbook on surviving and thriving under fear based leadership. Kate Lowry, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's a pleasure to have you on. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Oh yeah, for sure. I feel like this topic is all the rage right now.

Obviously a lot of fear out there. I'm going to ask you my favorite go to question. What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

Hmm. I think that one of the best pieces of advice I've received was advice to build a relationship with myself.

You know, a lot of people feel a lot of pressure to conform in different ways in society and their inner voice kind of gets squashed or silenced, especially around big personalities like fear based leaders.

And so I would say to, to anyone who feels like they don't really know themselves, you know, start listening, figure out what you like, try new things, find out what brings you energy, because at the end of the day, you are your best champion.

Right, exactly right. I agree with that wholeheartedly. So take us back to the early years. How did your upbringing influenced your approach to leadership?

Wow, it definitely did. My parents were examples of what not to do.

You know, I say that fear based leaders can show up anywhere, there's a power dynamic and someone decides to abuse that power. And both of my parents were very hierarchical, top down, cruel, difficult, manipulative.

And while that wasn't ideal, you know, for a child growing up, it meant that I had essentially 20 years to run experiments on them and figure out what were the best ways to preserve my own autonomy, what were the best ways to preserve my agency, how what worked to de escalate them, you know, if they got really mad about something and um, how could I distract them or refocus them if they were focusing on something that I didn't want them to focus on?

And what that meant is that when I entered the business world and encountered difficult, bombastic leaders, I already had a lot of experience under my belt and was able to kind of refine those techniques and big tech and management consulting and the rest of my career.

So let's jump to your time in the, in the corporate world. So what did your time at McKinsey, Meta and Inside Partners teach you? About power and fear.

Yeah. So one of the first things that I learned is that many leaders, from Fortune 500 CEOs to community group leaders are very lonely.

They feel a lot of pressure. They feel like they can't say to their boards above them, help, I don't know what I'm doing. And they have to look strong for the people below them.

And a lot of them have really deep seated insecurities.

And one of the reasons I named the advice about learning to like yourself is that it's very hard to like and support other people if you don't like and support yourself. And that's something that unfortunately I saw with many leaders was a lot of them don't feel like they know what they're doing.

And it becomes easy to move towards styles of leadership that are more simplistic. Might makes right, get in line or get out. It's my way or the highway, that type of thinking.

So was there a turning point in your development that helped you develop a methodology to help other people?

Yeah. So it was early, early this year, and I noticed that my coaching clients, my peers in Silicon Valley, were kind of spinning out.

They were overwhelmed, panicking, freezing people, different types of stress responses. And I was hearing the same thing from a lot of different people. Man, my boss is so difficult. I can't do anything right.

Like, I really want to leave, but I don't know where I could go. Wow. My investors are really challenging. They're just being super extractive. I feel like they're treating me like machine.

And it was at that point that I realized that a lot of people were struggling with this, but I was totally fine. And I went, oh, no. I have a skill set they don't have. I need to find a way to teach it to them really fast. And so that's what I did.

I wrote a tactical guide where I'm teaching people how to protect what they care about in very adverse environments.

So let's talk about your book Unbreakable. What inspired you to write it?

Yeah, it was this overwhelming need from the people around me and just a genuine desire to help them.

I think my publisher thought I was a bit of a weirdo because I put a special clause in my contract that said that if I need to, I can just release the whole book for free. Because I'm like, I want everyone to have access to this, like, as much as possible. Let's just get this in the hands of, of people who need it.

And when I started writing about was then that I started realizing that Things that were very obvious to me were not obvious to other people.

And that's why I tried to write something that was digestible and friendly, like feeling like someone's sitting across from you in a coffee shop teaching you how to deal with assholes.

I love that.

So for those who are kind of dealing with that light now, living through it like you did even growing up, how do fear based leaders operate and why is that so prevalent? Especially maybe in the business world?

Yes, certainly. So a lot of people feel like these types of leaders are scary because they find them really unpredictable. They're actually super predictable.

But they use a very different system of logic than most people. A lot of their logic is about power, deference, posturing and emotion.

And so if you learn how they think and make decisions, you can learn to predict what they're going to do. And when people are predictable, it means that influence tactics to manage them work very reliably on them.

And so, yeah, for folks dealing with people like this, I would say they deliberately manufacture chaos. But you don't have to believe the chaos.

Fear based leaders like creating chaos because when the people around them are destabilized, it makes them easier to control.

That's funny because I can see that in our society today, it seems like there's a lot of fear based stuff going on around us. And I mean, if you just turn on YouTube a little bit, the first six videos are all fear based videos.

So you could just kind of, you feel like you're living in that reality.

Oh my gosh, it's, it's rough out there. Um, you know, fear anger really sells in the media. And what these leaders will try to tell you is you're powerless. You're, you're nothing without me.

Resistance has futile, blah, blah, blah. Uh, and I'm here to tell you that you shouldn't believe them. You're, you're not powerless. You're actually really powerful.

You just need to learn the skills to access different levers to help you pull some of your power back.

So if you're working with a client who's dealing with a fear based leader, what are some practical strategies that you teach your clients how to navigate their life through this with a fear based leader?

Yeah. First I help them understand the commodities fear based leaders deal in. So commodities are things like information, attention and availability.

Fear based leaders weaponize information. If you say, man, I'm so excited to go camping this weekend, you can bet they'll make you work over the weekend, get rid of your camping trip.

So you have to be very mindful of what you share and make sure that you're holding your cards pretty close to your chest. Secondly, you have to understand that this type of leader feeds on attention and reactions. They especially love big, negative reactions. Oh, no.

How dare you cancel my camping trip. You're the worst boss ever. I hate you. That's like, ooh, you know, really lights them up.

And so I teach people that they should pretend to be something really inert, something boring in the landscape, like a gray rock. You know, if the fear based leader comes and kicks a rock, the rock doesn't do anything and it's boring to kick.

And so that means that the leader will move on to someone else because they're not getting the reactions that feed their energy. And then lastly, I talk about availability as leverage. So it can be difficult to set direct boundaries with leaders like this.

But one way to quietly reassert that you have power in the situation is to modulate your availability.

You know, even just waiting three or four hours to reply to an email for someone that expects instant availability is enough to make that leader doubt themselves and go, do they not fear me? Am I not commanding enough?

And it kind of sends them in spirals that people are not appropriately respecting them, but they can't really get mad about it. So it's a way to keep them off balance.

As I hear that though, I'm thinking, if you're in that situation with a fear based leader and you employ some of these tactics, aren't you kind of worried that this fear based leader will go, well, if you're not fun to kick around, I'll just fire you?

Fear based leaders are interesting in that they label everyone around them as either useful tools or like hapless sheep. And so one thing I talk about in the book is when you first meet a fear based leader, they are assessing you and they're testing you.

They want to know, how much can I push you? Do you call me out on things, you know, what do you believe of the lies that I tell you? And so on.

And so you probably want to be classified as a useful tool because a boring tool is something that you keep around, right? You still do something that's valuable even if you get put in the category of being a sheep.

You know, sheep are an audience for a fear based leader, right? And part of their ego is they're always having to shore up the pedestal that they're standing on.

And so they have to have people around them that they feel like are below them for them to feel like they're above other people.

So you, you make yourself useful by providing something that they need even though you're not giving in to their fear based influence.

Right. And it's your choice how you want to be perceived by them. You can pretend to be their ally, you can choose to be underestimated.

You can, you know, do a lot of different things. That is an act of choice in how you're positioned. But the way fear based leaders see other people is really without nuance.

They're almost like they see everyone around them as cardboard cutouts. And so whatever you get bucketed as, they'll always stereotype you as that role.

And that means there's a lot of freedom for you to play within it because they'll just assume that you're behaving according to the role they classify you as.

As I hear you talk about this, I'm wondering, can you as an employee thrive in an environment like this? It seems like it's so toxic that this is not an environment you want to spend a lot of your time in.

Are you always looking for the next thing to get out of this? Because it's like I have a ceiling in this environment where I can really only go so far.

Yeah, it's not fun to be around fear based leaders. And if you can leave and find something better, you pretty much always should.

However, when I started my career, about three in 10 leaders I encountered were like this. In the last three to five years, it's now around seven to 10. And you could say you're in sharp elbowed industries.

Finance and tech have difficult people and that's true.

But from my peer groups and what I'm seeing, people will leave one toxic company and they will join another company that is a different flavor of toxic. And so when it starts to become inescapable or broader systems that you're interacting with in your life have folks like this at the top.

It's very important to learn skills to protect yourself. And as someone who's been around people like this for the majority of of my life, I can say it is possible to thrive.

But you kind of have to learn to batten down the hatches and figure out, you know, what the best way to deal is for you.

So without giving us any details that would get you in trouble, can you share a story of someone who took your methodologies and learned to thrive in a situation like this?

Yeah, definitely.

So I was coaching someone who had recently joined a company and right after she joined the company got taken over by private Equity and private equity, as someone who's worked in private equity is a very transactional, extractive industry. They don't really value people. And she was like, oh man, I'm really afraid I'm going to be fired. People are coming in, what am I going to do?

And it was true. The people that were brought in were the type of people who cared about very specific things.

And so I worked with her to teach her what motivated and incentivized them so that everything she wanted to do in her department could be framed in terms of incentives that appealed to their interests. And that made her, you know, a rising star in her company because the leaders were like, wow, she gets it.

You know, she's giving me the metrics I need before I'm asking for them. All of her initiatives are laddering up to the, you know, three prong strategy that I wrote.

We're going to just leave her alone and let her run her team. And that's kind of best case scenario when you're around fear based leaders.

That's helpful. So you describe fear based leaders as being highly predictable.

Can you kind of describe some of the common patterns that you may notice in a typical fear based leader?

Definitely. The first thing is that fear based leaders don't believe in equality. They believe you're either being stepped on or doing the stepping.

And so you can bet the first time they meet you, they're going to size you up and then try to step on you. And you can also bet that they're going to be repeatedly testing how much they can mess with your reality so that they can control you.

And this is why in my book, I say that when leaders start telling you things like you didn't really see that it was something else, don't believe what you're seeing. This other thing is happening.

I tell people to call it out right away because they'll try to create their own reality with their own facts and their own rules. These types of leaders also love to do what I call move fast and break things.

And in the tech industry, move fast and break things normally means you innovate so fast, some things break along the way. Fear based leaders have a different type of move fast and break things. They often come in and break as many things as they can as fast as possible.

And you might be like, wow, that's a huge trail of destruction. Why are they doing that?

But what that means is if you have a fear based leader coming in, you can bet that they're going to want to destroy some stuff to create A big lasting impression and cement themselves as the top dog bully. And so you can see how the way they think is very formulaic. You know, if people like this, I will destroy it.

You know, if, if this gets a big reaction, I will do it. If I'm given information, I will weaponize it.

And this type of very simplistic thinking, it really underlies all of their actions because they themselves are very emotionally immature. So the logic that they use is usually more like five year old logic compared to what you would expect a mature, rational leader to do.

Sounds like a bully in the sandbox. So you mentioned that fear based leaders tighten their grip through the chaos. You just described kind of a chaotic situation.

How does this dynamic affect team morale and innovation you talk about, especially being in the tech world. How does that work in the tech industry with fear based leaders and morale?

Wow. It's really interesting because fear based leadership chokes innovation very quickly. You see this at Tesla, the siren cybertruck was a big flop.

They're not performing well this quarter. SpaceX rockets are blowing up all the time. You know, X is not doing very well. You see this at Meta.

Meta is giving people hundreds of millions of dollars to be in their AI division and yet they're behind all the other LLM makers. And this is because when people are running on fear, it robs them of their creativity. You aren't going to be able to think clearly if you're scared.

And if you're scared, you're not going to be strategic.

And so when I run into people who are in fear states or survival states, as a coach, the first thing I do is ground them out of those states so that they can step back out of fire drill mode and make intentional choices. But in these companies, they never get out of fire drill mode.

When people have big ideas, they're afraid to share them because they think they'll be shamed.

And when things go wrong, like if there's an issue with a rocket about to launch, no one wants to say anything because they think the leader will get really mad. And so it's a leadership style that gets very short term and shoddy results.

Wow. So we'll let the rocket ship explode. We won't say anything because we don't want the leader upset.

Right, Right. I'd rather the rocket explode than leader explode. Right.

So don't get on rocket ships was what you're telling me. In part one of Unbreakable, you dive into fear based how fear based leaders think.

What's one psychological insight that helps People better manage these leaders.

Yeah, I think that it's important for people to understand that these leaders are called fear based because they themselves are very insecure and afraid because they only know running on fear. It's what they use to motivate others. They have missed a lot of what I call kindergarten lessons.

You know, how to apologize, how to make friends, how to build trust. And so when you interact with them, you have to remember of what their capacity is.

They don't have capacity to be empathetic or compassionate or responsible. And so you can't expect them to behave that way.

Instead, you need to understand what they, they do have in stock and learn to work with what's actually there.

So let's talk about a little bit of tactics. You have a lot of tactics in your book to help people deal with resilience.

What are two or three tools in your book Unbreakable that listeners can start using today if they're in a fear based environment?

Yeah, definitely. So first of all, stop sharing anything about what you actually care about with the leader.

In fact, when you need to negotiate with them, expect them to negotiate in bad faith. I usually tell people, if you want one thing from a fear based leader, ask for three things.

Let them kill the two that you pretend to really want, and then settle for the third, which is the thing you actually need. It's counterintuitive, but it's really how they operate.

And then secondly, to what I was just saying, I have a chapter called don't shop for milk at the hardware store. And don't shop for milk at the hardware store means if you go to the hardware store looking for milk, you're gonna be disappointed.

And fear based leaders don't have traditional leadership qualities in stock. So remember what they do have in stock and choose one of those things instead.

And then lastly, I would say it's very annoying when these leaders monologue. Almost all of them will monologue at length about their foes and the things they don't like and how people are incompetent.

But you should listen very carefully to their monologues to understand what they care about.

And then if you can frame the things that you want and need in terms of what they care about, whether it's something that they hate or like, that's giving you the keys to preserving the things that you want.

As I hear this, I think to myself, or if they find out you're manipulating them, how do fear based leaders do? Because what you're talking about really is manipulating kind of them to do what you need them to do.

Do they ever become self aware to realize, hey, I'm being manipulated? And does that backfire on you?

Yeah. So a lot of people don't realize that tactics themselves are morally neutral.

Most people who think about using strategies to manage relationships think about them with mal intent. When you use tactics with mal intent, that's, that's manipulation. When you use tactics with positive intent to protect, that's called influencing.

And so I'm suggesting that you positively influence the leaders to be more ethical than they otherwise would be by understanding how they think and make choices. And the answer is actually no. They typically don't realize it. They have very extreme levels of arrogance.

And arrogance is one of the most blinding things in the world. It means that they only see what they want to see.

If they think that you're a useless sheep, they don't even see that it's possible you could be smart in manipulating them or influencing them. You know, if they see you as a useful tool, they only see you as a tool and so on.

My book is written actually so that fear based leaders themselves could read it and not see themselves in it.

Because the thing about calling them fear based is that no one wants to admit that they themselves are motivated by fear or that people only follow them because of fear. And so it's almost like a form of protective denial that they could read the whole thing and just think it's about their toxic thoughts.

I like that. I like how you, how you frame that because that makes it sound a lot different than you're trying to do something nefarious with your intentions.

You're trying to actually help improve the leader and your situation. So I like the way you describe that.

I feel better now knowing I may be working if I work with a fear based leader, that I'm not, I'm not the bad person too, because sometimes I think we worry that if we employ these tactics, we're no better than they are. We're just a different version of them.

Yeah, I really believe that both intent and action matter. And essentially fear based leaders do not care about other humans experiences. They find people to be messy, variable, annoying.

And so the people who are reading this book are often people who care very deeply about the humans in the system. Whether there's a leader of a medical system who's like that, you're trying to protect patients or doctors or staff or whoever it is.

And so my entire book is written purely to help people protect. And I do not espouse people using these tactics for you know, nefarious reasons.

That's good. So we've been focusing on, you know, using Unbreakable in the corporate setting.

But it's actually bigger than that because let's face, we talked about a little bit addressing it. They're fear based leaders are in all aspects of our life. They're in our families, they're in our communities.

How does fear based leadership show up in those spaces? That's not corporate.

Yeah. So, you know, fear based leadership shows up anywhere there's a power dynamic and someone chooses to abuse it.

There are some sibling relationships where an older sibling bullies a younger sibling and that's using fear based tactics. There are certainly many parental relationships, spouse relationships, where people abuse power dynamics.

You see leadership like this very frequently in community groups, nonprofits. Oftentimes fear based leaders are drawn to things with societal status that gives them authority.

So they want to be the person that everyone else is listening to. They want control over money, people, et cetera.

And so I think that most people in their life will interact with someone like this at some point, whether you're a stay at home mom and this is someone who's the head of your PTA or whether you're a CEO and the biggest investor on your cap table is like this. And so this type of toolkit is really important, especially when this type of leadership is experiencing a new wave of permissiveness.

It was very taboo five years ago for Silicon Valley CEOs to not at least pretend to care about their employees. And now we're seeing employees at Microsoft and Apple die at their desks and no one at the company cares.

And that's a sea change, you know, for people who used to say, we're going to make this the best place to work ever. Now saying, I don't care. Like you don't like it, don't be here. And so that means people need these skills now more than ever.

Because this book was based on a little bit of your growing up with that kind of fear based interaction in your own personal life. What was the most emotionally challenging chapter for you to write in? Unbreakable.

Oh, that's really interesting. I actually found the chapter where I had to write about how to navigate the legal system to be the hardest.

I have had to interact with the legal system many times in my life, starting actually as a child trying to protect me from one of my parents. And my experiences navigating it have been very harrowing as a whistleblower, as a plaintiff and so on.

And writing that chapter was especially hard because it meant having to admit that many people around Fairbase leaders were going to have to deal with being made to do illegal things or have illegal things done to them. And they're going to have to interact with a very challenging section of society to get their needs met.

Lawyers are trained to see their clients as sheep. And that means that it is sometimes very hard to find people who can adequately protect you from, you know, difficult things.

Wow, that is hard. I can imagine that as you get encourage people to get this book and to use it in their workplaces and their homes and their communities.

How would you coach someone to interact with leaders today using your book as a tool?

I would say that it's important to approach all interactions with intention and to show up with curiosity and compassion, even when you're not getting that back. It actually drives fear based leaders crazy if you're kind and collaborative with them. But I'm not saying it because of that.

I'm saying it because you should never let an environment like this rob you of your values or rob you of who you are.

And even if fear based leaders take many things away from you, you still get to choose how you show up each day and how you choose to protect yourself and the people that you care about.

That's really good. So can I ask my guest this question? What do you want your legacy to be?

Oh, man. Well, I'm not concerned about my legacy at all. If everyone forgets who I am, that's fine.

But I do really care that I help people really have more fulfilling lives where they feel less alone and they have the skills that they need to feel safe and loved and known. You know, in my coaching practice, I work with CEOs on how to build companies people want to work at.

In my writing, I teach people skills about how to navigate really difficult parts of their life. And in my comedy, I write about the uniquely human experiences that we have so that people really do feel less alone.

That's great. So on season six of the podcast, we're doing something new. We have a surprise question. Pick a number between one and six.

Ooh, five.

If you could look through one person's email without them knowing, whose email would you look through?

I think it would be really interesting to see the Dalai Lama's email because, like, we always picture him as being so wise and so calm and so good. You know, like, does he use emojis? Right.

Like, does he use camel emojis?

Right.

I think a lot about the hundreds of emails I have to send every day and how I can make them better, you know, if I can touch each person's life with an email in a positive way. But it's hard, you know, it's hard to get it right.

It is. So, Kate, where can people connect with you and where can they buy your book? Unbreakable?

Yes. So you can buy it wherever books are sold online at Barnes and Noble and Amazon or Indigo.

You can follow me on LinkedIn or Instagram aet Unbreakable Lowry. I write twice a week on my substack@kately substack.com and also post on Facebook.

Well, Kate, thank you for sharing your story, your insights and your heart. For everyone out there navigating through fear based leadership, Unbreakable is more than a book, it's a lifeline.

You can learn more about Kate's work, coaching and creative projects@kately.com and if you're a leader looking to build trust instead of fear, now's the time to start. Until next time, keep blazing trails and keep challenging titans. Thank you, Kate.

Well, thanks for having me.