Thought Leadership Studio Podcast Episodes:
The CLEAR Path to Strategic Leadership Success with Mark Nitz
Episode 94 - Building Stronger Leaders: How Virtues, Strategy, and Critical Thinking Drive Lasting Influence
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Or Click here to listen or subscribe on appWhat this episode will do for you
:- Understand the Foundations of Leadership Virtues: Learn about the four key virtues of leadership—courage, wisdom, justice, and moderation—and why they are essential for effective leadership.
- Develop a Core Belief in Self: Discover how great leaders build confidence and put their team's success ahead of their own ego.
- Apply the CLEAR Strategy Framework: Explore Mark Nitz’s CLEAR model, which focuses on core identity, landscape analysis, execution, agility, relationships, and risk management.
- Improve Decision-Making with Critical Information Requirements: Learn how to filter out noise and focus on the key insights that drive better leadership and strategy.
- Balance Risk and Innovation: Understand why taking calculated risks is crucial for innovation and how leaders can manage uncertainty effectively.
- Apply Leadership Lessons to Strategic Thought Leadership: See how leadership principles extend beyond organizations to guiding audiences and shaping market perspectives.
Mark Nitz.
In this episode, I welcome back Mark Nitz, leadership expert, author, and founder of ClearSight Leadership & Strategy. Mark is known for his CLEAR Strategy Framework, which helps organizations develop core identity, analyze competitive landscapes, improve execution, and build resilience.
We discuss the four core virtues of leadership—courage, wisdom, justice, and moderation—and how leaders can develop a core belief in self to put their team’s success ahead of their own ego. Mark also shares insights on critical information requirements, the importance of adaptability, and why risk-taking is essential for innovation.
Join us as we explore how these leadership principles apply not just to organizations, but also to Strategic Thought Leadership.
Some of Mark's coordinates:
Curated Transcript of Interview with Mark Nitz
The following partial transcript is lightly edited for clarity - the full interview is on audio. Click here to listen.
Chris McNeil: I'm your host of Thought Leadership Studio, Chris McNeil, and I am thrilled to host Mark Nitz again.
Mark is a leadership expert, celebrated author and founder of ClearSight Leadership and Strategy, known for pioneering leadership frameworks that emphasize virtues and strategic alignment. In our last conversation, we explored inspirational leadership and today we'll dive into his three book series, Essential Pathways Publications, including Strategy and Leadership, how to achieve both.
Mark's work champions immutable Principles, core Values, guiding Resilient High Performing Teams, and as Clear Strategy Framework provides actionable insights for navigating complexity. I'm super excited to explore how these timeless ideas can elevate leadership. Great to have you again, Mark.
Mark Nitz: Hey, good to see you, Chris, and looking forward to a good conversation.
Chris McNeil: Yeah, so we talked about a few things before we started recording, and maybe just before we dive more deeply into these subjects, including your books, delegation mastery, critical information Requirements, maybe we can catch up our listener who's not so familiar with your work - some of them may not be - and give us a story about what got you to where you are now and doing what you're doing now.
From Authority to Authenticity: The True Power of Leadership
Mark Nitz: Yeah, having spent about 20 years in the corporate world, a little over 20 years in the corporate world, I actually came out of the Fortune 100 feeling like I had something to offer that really wasn't desired, and that was a lot of the impetus for digging deeper into some of what I learned, what was catalyzed by some of my time in the Army.
And as an army officer, I spent time as an officer candidate, school attack officer, which was a great learning experience and a lot of that learning experience didn't really mesh or come together until I looked back on it. I enjoyed being a tech officer, teaching people how to lead, teaching people what leadership entails, all that stuff was really intriguing, but actually learned some really personal lessons after the fact.
And my desire is to assure or to provide that connection with how it matters to you, how it matters to the listener, how it matters to their teams. That connection is very personal, it's very individual, and the hope is, and yes, hope, I know hope is not always a good word in business, but the hope is that individually people will start to really put themselves into leadership capacities, go deeper than we use this model for sales or we use this for how to build a skill, things like that.
But it's core belief in self and understanding yourself, your person, what your strengths are, what you love, what you believe, and bringing that passion into the team to spark success
Chris McNeil: Our belief in self. I love that. What specifically do you mean by that, and how would you know the difference in someone who's developed the core belief in himself versus a leader who has not?
Mark Nitz: A lot of the challenge for followers with leaders who have not is overcoming that or being able to see that that leader has not overcome the need to perform expectation and that the leader places a high intensity expectation on both the leader performing and the team performing at a level of expectation that comes from other people.
So to lay it out, it's a top down. You need to perform. That leader turns around and says, you need to perform. The followers say, why do we need to perform? And leader says, just do it.
Chris McNeil: So without connecting it, the things like these amenable principles or virtues that we've discussed ...
Mark Nitz: Right. If you can lead with that belief, if you can sense the followership so to speak, if you can sense your leaders expectations and your strengths why you're in that leadership position, things start to change. You also have to express that belief to your followers. It can't just be about money and numbers.
Timeless Leadership Virtues: Lessons from Greek Philosophy
Chris McNeil: We've talked a lot about the four of your virtues in the past, and since that's still central, why don't you describe what those are for the listener?
Mark Nitz: Yeah. The origin of those really is rooted deeply in Greek philosophy and several thousand years old. One of the connections here is the better leader is courageous, and courage being one of those virtues is courageous in a way that the not yet better leader isn't. That better leader can turn around to their team and say, Hey, this situation is challenging.
I'm in this with you. Here's what I believe about your skills, your strengths, what I believe about you as people and your ability to place this achievement, to look for this success and to work towards this success in a way that I will support you every step of the way. I believe in you, and if you actually believe that your people will read it, they will see it, they will feel it, and they will follow. That comes from courage. What about the other three, right?
Chris McNeil: Yep.
Mark Nitz: Oftentimes that leads to the value of wisdom. It is very easily demonstrated. The difference between wisdom and unquote smarts is very easily demonstrated in that leaders who are applying wisdom will look to their people first for the skills, for the strengths, for the capabilities, and they will ask questions.
That leader often has been in positions where a plan doesn't work. They prepare their people for, Hey, we've got this primary plan, then we've got an alternate, and then we've got a contingent plan, right? We've got two or three options here, and they ask their people, okay, when do we switch? How do we know when we need to? Hey, let's go with the alternate here because this isn't working.
And they ask their people because their people know the skills, their people know the details, their people know how the structure works, they know the design. When you're a leader and you're a wise leader, you're a leader of people, not a leader of processes.
Chris McNeil: That's a useful distinction. So we've got courage and wisdom...
Mark Nitz: Justice pops up quite often in those situations because in current teams, in their current state, often there are competing players on the team and they're actually competing against one another. And that's in part because in the early 21st century, we've spent a lot of time setting up situations where to get ahead, you have to compete, you have to be better, you have to show that you're better, and there may be someone there that's ready to undermine what you're doing.
And having experienced situations like that personally, I know it can be really devastating, and it's even more devastating if that's a situation that's actually set up by the leader. It is unfair when we come out of a situation thing, oh, that's so unfair. The justice button has been hit. It's been pushed probably many, many times, and a wise leader who's willing to stand up and show that courage will step up and say, justice matters.
Are the people on my team being treated fairly? It doesn't mean are they being treated evenly? It means are they being treated fairly? Am I treating them fairly? Do I assure that the right strength is employed at the right time and do I communicate that with everybody? Here's why this strength matters. Here's why these skills matter to this success, and are we as a team focused on that success rather than being focused on me as a leader?
Chris McNeil: We certainly don't want internal conflict within our organizations. A country that has a civil war is in no shape to go invade another. Right? So we got courage, wisdom, justice ...
Mark Nitz: And so I think that final lead in is, hang on, I got to pause for just a moment here. Sorry about the interruption. Sorry, because I've got these all in Greek speak and I'm confusing myself. Hang on just a moment.
Okay, so the application of moderation is one that is a skill, it's an ability, it's an awareness that I think not a lot of people give energy to, and that the reason that self-control that restraint matters is that as the leader of a team, when you're standing in front of them, when you're talking through the fair distribution of tasks, the skills that are necessary, things like that, when you're actually leading with courage, one of the things that you're doing, one of the things that you need to focus on internally and part of your personal self-awareness is that self-control slash restraint.
And why that matters is that we are people of desire. Humans have desires. That's one of the few elements of our existence that separates us from just about everything else. Your desire to accomplish something, your desire to achieve actually needs to be set aside in those moments. Professional leaders are well versed at being able to say, okay, yeah, here's what I want, but these successes are what matter. That's my focus. That's where my team focuses.
That's really what's leading this team is this success or this achievement, I need to set myself aside so that we can achieve this. And you do so in a way that the team's success really is what gets supported and really is what gets celebrated. Honestly, there can be no, there's no faking it till you make it. When it comes to self-restraint in a team environment, you can't pretend, and that matters so much because that team must know that they really are who are being supported. It cannot be reproach. It cannot look like you're just saying that you have to demonstrate it and you have to believe it.
Beyond Personal Branding: Leadership as a Higher Purpose
Chris McNeil: That's part of setting your ego aside, isn't it? ... In favor of absolutely higher purpose ...
... And to give the listeners some context, I know this podcast is about Strategic Thought Leadership. It's about online influence, but leadership is leadership and the same lessons that apply in leading an organization in the marketplace or leading a team within an organization.
They apply to someone practicing Strategic Thought Leadership, perhaps with their team of people that support their thought leadership or perhaps indefinitely in this case, actually leading in the audience to embrace new models or new concepts or new perspectives that they're bringing to the marketplace. These things apply, and I'm glad you brought up that moderation part too, because that's the setting the ego aside is I think a distinguishing differentiator between what some call personal branding and Strategic Thought Leadership.
Mark Nitz: Yes.
Chris McNeil: (Personal) branding is to me, from what I've seen, it's more ego-based, where Strategic Thought Leadership is more service-based, absolutely building a model outside of yourself that others can participate in a creative project and perhaps a team create project. So in your estimation, mark and what you've seen and experienced, what percentage of companies are actually practicing these four virtues intentionally or not, versus those that aren't?
Mark Nitz: Yeah. I'll start with the statement. Very few. I don't have precise statistics, but the percentage is probably in the 25 to 30 range, and that's giving a little bit of credit here and there. So very, very low percentage of companies that, and that's kind of across the board in terms of small, medium, large, but very small percentage that actually leverage this kind of deep personal awareness approach to I'm the leader.
What matters is the success of my team and setting the expectation, communicating the expectation that really what matters, what the real leader here is, the success is the achievement. What do we need to achieve? That's what should be leading us. If my staff and my team aren't capable, that's on me. I need to figure out a way to train them. If my staff and my team don't want to, I need to figure out what inspires them and why they don't want to.
What is it that they're reluctant about? Which means I need to ask all the right questions, and it can take some time to figure that out on your own. And so there are ways, there are methods for developing those information requirements that those team leaders need in order to set up a structure where achievement is what's guiding us and leading us. I believe in my team, I believe in their strengths, their capabilities.
I honestly want them to succeed and their success is my success, so I am going to set myself aside and ensure that I put my effort into giving them what they need, that appropriate distribution of expectation tasks. No one team member is more important than the other. Everybody understands their purpose. We communicate it every day and we believe in what we are going to achieve and guiding it that route.
Chris McNeil: Something else I got out of what you're saying is the willingness to shoulder the responsibility of leadership.
Mark Nitz: Absolutely, yep.
Chris McNeil: I think in the context of strategic thought leadership, it is putting your audience's needs ahead of your own.
Mark Nitz: It is, absolutely, yep.
Cutting Through the Noise: How Leaders Identify What Really Matters
Chris McNeil: And you mentioned the critical information requirements. That's something we touched on before we started recording and making sure that people aren't suffering from information overload.
And I know when you start working on an online influence, information overload is very tempting in that context as well because there's so many vanity metrics available to us designed to get those quick fixes.
But tell us, what do you mean by official information requirements and how does it apply in this context too?
Mark Nitz: Yeah, yep. And it is a good segue to critical information requirements are the list of words and phrases that you're listening for as a leader, both internally and externally that will tell you more about what's going on, and that seems like a really broad general topic.
Having that right list of information that you're listening for developed helps you screen out all of the, call it the noise or all of the influencer topics where the words that are tossed in are intended to draw you in, but when they start talking, you're like, well, does this really apply? How do I, and you listen anyway? How can you figure out fairly quickly whether or not that YouTube video is worth watching? Does it include critical information requirements that you and your team are looking for?
And so to develop that list is really important. How do you know when you're talking to a client whether or not what you're producing is going to really help them? Is it really what they're looking for? Pushing through a sales model, that sales pitch model does not necessarily help. You're not going to convince them if there is no desire.
And so you are listening if you learn to listen very precisely. It's not about listening better, it's about listening very precisely. Is this person actually looking for what I can provide?
Chris McNeil: What would be a way of organizing around information that's helpful and having what criteria would help you understand what's helpful and what's not?
Mark Nitz: Yeah, so a couple of good examples. Is the team looking for a fix for a problem? You don't know just because, well, my team's complaining, I'm going to go fix that. If my team's complaining about something, are they complaining an issue with the process? Are they complaining because there's an issue with the available skills? Are they complaining because there's a resource missing? Are they complaining because they feel like the expectations are something that are dropped on them and not necessarily either in their wheelhouse or in their skillset? Why is it they're complaining?
Oftentimes that's what we hear as leaders or the complaints. So being able to dig into those complaints just a little bit more, asking questions like, okay, is this a resource problem? Do you have the tools, the technology that you need? If not, what is it that you need that tells you as the leader how you can support them, which is, I'm going to go get this right. I'm going to make sure they have what they need in order to succeed.
Is it a misalignment of expectations? Oftentimes, change management plans, push expectations on teams that don't necessarily fit with the skill sets or frankly, the professional and career expectations of the team members, and that's why you get a lot of resistance. How do I know that the team feels that way, and do I know which pieces they are resistant to? It could be that the overall idea sounds good, but there's someone who foresees a problem because the technology that they work with doesn't actually support that expectation.
That piece of software or that platform isn't built to handle what the organization says, oh, we'd really like you to do this, right? Or you need to come in and do this. Well, it sounds like I could, but I can't, right? Because my technology doesn't support that. How do you deal with that? Those are places where you as the leader need to step in and have the courage to, Hey, I'm going to step in here and make sure that either we adjust the plan or we bring in the right skills, or we get the right software or all of the above, something like that.
You as the leader need to be able to step up and say, your organization leaders, you're asking for this. You think we can do it, but we actually can't. This is not what we do. And that takes courage. You have to be able to say no at times.
Seeing Through the Customer’s Eyes: The Path to True Value Creation
Chris McNeil: Well, how do we get our information aligned with the customer so that we are helping the customer fulfill whatever they're pulling on the system of our organization for and flush out waste of internal friction of all the things that go on inside of companies that may not be meaningful to the customer?
Mark Nitz: Yep, yep, yep. So a good example of what you're looking for is when you ask the customer, Hey, do you have a product or something that you use consistently? You may believe your product is superior to the one that they're using. Are there in that customer's industry, are there levels of expectation or are there value driven results that they are willing to dig into the details, asking questions, are there gaps in the results when you use this product?
Or are there flaws that you've noticed that you would like to fix? How would you fix them? What would make this product better? And whether it's something that you sell or something that someone else sells, knowing where the potential gaps are or knowing what you might be able to fix, put a little bit of energy into grow that customer's relationship with. You can matter a lot.
Asking more questions, asking the right questions can lead to a deeper relationship, which for the customer reduces risk and builds your reputation. So touches on that R piece of my clear strategy model. So just being able to dig into those sorts of detailed questions is often a better sales model than, oh, here's our pitch. Here's where we do the ask, and here's where we don't let the customer off the phone type stuff that can actually be damaging, not really listening to why doesn't the customer want this?
Chris McNeil: Well, absolutely, and to put this into context for our listeners, going to the customer side of the table, looking at our organizations from the outside in, because the customer's the one who sets the value in any service business in particular.
So if we're not designing from the customer's point of view, there's going to be waste. And where leadership comes in, Strategic Thought Leadership in particular, is when we find the answers to questions like, "What is the purpose of this product or service in your life?" "What does it do for you?" "What's your intention with it?"
And find that because of outdated ways of perceiving our category, stale mental models, outdated, limiting belief systems where people don't fully fulfill the values that they're trying to fulfill from a product or service, or they could connect a whole new value to it - and elevate its use to a higher purpose that they don't yet see - enables us to do this kind of persuasion in a positive way to help customers get more value through the unique benefits of what we're providing.
Mark Nitz: Yes.
Chris McNeil: ...Contextualizing that in Strategic Thought Leadership.
The CLEAR Model: Aligning Strategy, Execution, and Relationships
Now, you mentioned your CLEAR model. Why don't you tell the listener more about that?
Mark Nitz: So in the Essential Pathways book series, one of the things I dig into quite a bit in strategy in leadership is the application of a much more direct way of thinking about business strategy. And it is really important to understand terminology and what words, how to apply words. We hear the words strategic a lot. In fact, most often the word strategic is simply stuck in front of another word to make the word sound cool. Pretty much the idea of being strategic is, and I think your title, Strategic Thought leadership is brilliant because it is about thinking through what and how might we be able to achieve something, the future, the value of strategy and leadership.
And what that book provides is a walkthrough of going beyond the why question in strategy. Why is our product better? Why does our company exist? Those are good questions to ask. How can you establish and communicate the core identity of the company that you want your staff to believe in? And so that core identity is the first piece. We don't necessarily always revisit that core identity consistently we should. That's a critical function within core identity evaluation.
What do you know about your market landscape? Do you do landscape analysis on a monthly basis? That landscape analysis tells us what's happening in our market, who's influencing the market? Something it digs into even deeper is if we launch a successful product or service, what happens to the market when we do? Are we paying attention to how the other competitors in the market respond to that? And if not, you got to dig deeper into your landscape analysis. There are ways to do it.
Execution pathways, how efficient are your teams at executing? How efficient are they at being able to apply skills, apply teams to the right service teams, to the right product people to the right client or customer agility and operations? Do your teams adapt? And it's not just, yeah, every once in a while something changes and they shift with that. It is, do they adapt to a person being out for a week or a month? Do they adapt to how that market is changing?
Are they paying attention to when they need to adapt? Do they foresee changes? How is technology and how are advancements in technology going to affect their product or their service and say, Hey, this might change what we do. That kind of adaptability tells you something about the maturity of the leadership and the maturity of the organization.
And then the R in CLEAR actually has three parts, and that is your relationships. Are you genuine in your communication and your networking and your essentially business friendships? Do you develop those relationships? Do you look for opportunity for new and valuable relationships? All that is really important because that's what impacts your reputation, not just your ability to produce a good product or provide a good service, but are you genuine in your human interaction? Guess what? We can sense that. It's really important to know and to understand that we as humans can sense when somebody's not being genuine.
And that impacts your reputation, which is second R. Your reputation is also impacted by things like, hey, if somebody's capabilities or skills or strengths or personal situation is impacting work and productivity, do you get rid of them? And what I mean by that is do you fire them? Believe it or not, that'll impact your reputation in a negative way because now you have to basically scramble to find someone to fill that gap, that role, that person does not like you very much. I guarantee it. They are not going to speak highly of you or your company.
And the people around you, the business people around you will learn of this and know that staff are essentially dispensable. If you ever watch Star Trek about the expendable crew member, right? You don't want expendable crew members. If you take the time. Plus, it costs you a lot of money to fill a gap that fast. Absolutely. If you take the time to find an off ramp for that person, maybe their strengths in their situation would be better suited for a different company for a different reason, et cetera, et cetera.
That person is going to at least say nice things about you because you put some effort into believing in them and understanding their situation. There's probably a company out there that could use a person with that mindset. Great. That company is going to be grateful. And you internally, people know, Hey, if something isn't working out for me here, or if I really don't like this or what have you, I can actually say something and they'll help me. You've undone that culture of fear that I'm going to lose my job if I have to spend some time doing something that is for me that maybe I have a health issue or I have a family member, et cetera. That fear dissipates. And when that fear dissipates, you have a far stronger culture.
So your reputation matters in all sorts of ways. And everything you do can impact your reputation, which leads to the risk piece. And one thing we need to learn and that businesses struggle with, still struggle with in this day and age is the risk averse approach. And when we operate risk averse, we operate in fear and everybody feels fear. It's a matter of what you do with it. Understanding that, hey, this might be risky, but we're going to evaluate whether or not willing to take that risk and in some cases say yes to taking on some risks. Because if you aren't willing to accept some risk, you're never going to innovate.
You can have all the ideas you want, but if you don't say, we're going to take on some risk here, we're going to try this, you're never going to innovate and you're never going to be at the top level that you want to be. You also have to internally manage risk and assuring that you're not exposing your staff to too much risk. That's on the leaders assuring that they're taking on enough without being too much also on the leaders assuring that your staff is not being risk averse and completely avoiding it altogether. Also on the leaders you have to communicate this stuff. So that's the clear model. Slightly longer explanation, but that's the CLEAR model.
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The transcript is lightly edited for clarity and is a partial transcript- the full interview is on audio. Click here to listen.
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