(00:01) Stephanie Warner: Welcome to Season 4, episode 52. Hello, my Father.
(00:11) Marcus: Hello, Daughter.
(00:13) Stephanie Warner: Good to be with you.
(00:15) Marcus: I know, I know I’m back off the trail, I guess. I’m back in my office…
(00:19) Stephanie Warner: You are. Welcome home.
(00:21) Marcus: Yeah. I just wanted to point out for everybody that I’ve got Rare Leadership in the background in Korean and in English. And so I just, you know, in case people couldn’t read Korean, I wanted them to know that was well.
(00:34) Stephanie Warner: That’s very exciting. And I think that was a release just in Korea. So yep, but that’s really exciting. I love it. Yeah, well, and speaking of releases, actually, I neglected to say this last time, but it’s even more appropriate this time. Ten years ago, in April, April 5th, 2016, Rare Leadership was published. So happy 10th birthday to Rare Leadership.
I say it’s even more apt now, because this episode comes out on September 7th, which is close to September 5th. My brain works in, you know, mysterious ways. So I will just say we gave a little shout out to it in April, but the reason we didn’t do this series in April is because Easter, and we wanted to, you know, keep the focus on Easter during that time. But…
(01:29) Marcus: I know. We’ll blame Easter. Okay, now we should….
(01:31) Stephanie Warner: Happy ten year. No. I’m just saying it. Happy ten years. Happy ten years, Rare Leadership. We didn’t forget you.
(01:37) Marcus: Yeah, hard to believe. It’s been ten years. It’s still going strong though. Yeah. So…
(01:42) Stephanie Warner: Yeah. It’s good stuff. Well and there’s even, you know, a kind of a spin off book from it called Rare Leadership in the Workplace. And yep, so, good job. And I just pray that God keeps using it in great ways. And we are excited.
(01:58) Marcus: Yeah. Continue to do training events at Christian organizations and secular corporations based on this material. So I think you know, partnering with Jim really made this a strong book, and glad it’s still getting used.
(02:15) Stephanie Warner: Yes, yes. So the goal of this series is to equip you to live and lead with more emotional intelligence and resilience on your walk with God. Check out the free discussion guide for this book in the description links. And I’ll also just shout out, if you want to go through a guided, you know, cohort through this book, and like the podcast gets you so far, but you want to go deeper and with other people, check out the Rare Leadership Bootcamp with Greg Neumeyer. It’s starting in October, 2026, and you can find more information about that in the link in the descriptions.
So, Father. Chapter two. I feel like this chapter is part of the iconicness of this book. This is where you talk about the difference between rare leaders and sandbox leaders. Yeah, set up the context here. What do you mean by sandbox leader?
(03:19) Marcus: So I discovered this term in a Harvard Business Review article, which you know I start every morning reading the Harvard. No, I’m just kidding. Somebody sent me this article, and it was called “We Need More Mature Leaders.” And in there, he was complaining about leaders who just don’t play well together, right? They’re like little kids in a sandbox who don’t play well together. So sandbox leadership is like a tagline for immature leaders who are, it’s like, if I don’t get my way, I’m going to take my ball and go home. Oh yeah, you think I’m that? Well, you’re another.
You know, one of the points he made in this article was, at a time when we need solid, grounded leadership more than ever, we seem to be in short supply of adults who act like adults. And so that, I want to give credit. You know, that’s where the idea of sandbox leadership came from. It is this idea of immature leaders who act like children and they let their petty arguments with each other get in the way of the greater good of what they’re trying to accomplish.
(04:24) Stephanie Warner: Yeah. Well, and if I remember correctly, that article came out in 2011 or something like that. You know, it’s something that I think every generation deals with at some level and, you know, it just keeps coming back. Why do you think immature leaders is such a thing? Like how can you achieve leadership if you are someone…
(04:40) Marcus: An immature person? Yeah.
(04:42) Stephanie Warner: Who’s so immature, right? Like how you would think that would stunt your ability to become a leader, but instead you see it rampant. So like what is…
(04:55) Marcus: Yeah. So what happens is, a couple of things. First of all, maturity and results don’t necessarily go hand in hand. And so… how do you put this? You can get results in immature ways, by threatening people, by bullying people, by you know, taking your ball and going home if you don’t get your way. It’s like there’s a lot of immature leaders who learn to get results.
So we actually tell a story about this from a study that was done at Purdue University that turned into a TED talk by Margaret Heffernan, and the story is about super chickens and how they want to, you know, breed super chickens, but really what they end up doing is breeding predator chickens. And so sometimes people end up in leadership because they’re just more predatory than everybody around them. And that is that, they are so good at pecking at other people. You know, chickens have a pecking order, right? They peck at others, and so what happens is their main concern is always making sure that they look good in comparison to others.
(06:07) Marcus: So they’ll spin narratives, they’ll, you know, do whatever. And what happens is if you only care about results, you will often promote people who, they have the numbers to back up getting a promotion, but their character doesn’t back up that promotion, and their maturity level doesn’t back it up. And so what happens is, you can begin collecting predatory people in positions of leadership. And this is way too common, right, which is one of the reasons why you hear about organizations that chew up and spit out people. That’s because they’ve been very results focused. And so it’s a real problem.
And you see a lot of, you know, narcissism built into this thing, where people can be quite charming, and they can be very personable, but behind the scenes is like you don’t want to cross them kind of thing. And so what we’re after here is people who have the maturity to have strong convictions, but be relational, you know, to stay relational, to keep their emotions under control, to have civil conversations, and all those sorts of things. So there’s a lot of that goes into that.
(07:20) Stephanie Warner: Yes. Okay. I want to ask you two questions coming out of that. One of them is I want you to define maturity a little bit, and talk about like, what is maturity, and its connection to leadership and transformation and such. But I also kind of want you to linger just a little bit longer on Super Chicken because I know what you’re talking about and it might have been clear enough for everybody else, but can you describe what the actual test was?
(07:44) Marcus: Sure. All right. So let’s start with maturity. The brain science perspective is essentially that your emotions don’t cause your brain to shut down. So maturity means, you can measure maturity by how much stressful emotion you can handle, and still keep the command center of your brain in control of what you’re doing. So that you act like yourself and you remain relational. Now those are two keys.
So RARE starts with Remain relational, Act like yourself. Those are really the two key things that define maturity is that, I don’t shut down, blow up, or melt down under stress, and I don’t turn into a different person under stress, right, and under pressure. And so you can measure it. That’s why sometimes we get overwhelmed, but we return quickly. So that’s the Return to the joy part of it.
And then Enduring hardship is really what this is all about. It’s like almost everybody can remain relational, act like themselves when life is easy. Mature people can do it when life is hard. And so they endure hardship well by remaining relational and acting like themselves, which means I’m not turning into somebody different. Cause let’s face it, when you turn into a different person under pressure, people never know who to expect.
And so they walk around you on eggshells, you know, because they never know, you know, are you going to be mature Marcus, or are you going to be immature Marcus? Are you going to be a bully or are you going to be kind? I don’t know what to expect from you, because you change constantly, depending on how much weight you’re having to carry. So maturity is measured by your capacity to handle emotional weight.
(09:34) Stephanie Warner: That’s really good. So really quickly the…
(09:38) Marcus: Super chickens? All right, super chickens. So I don’t know the exact numbers, but they got a a group of chickens in generation one, and they measured egg production, and they took the top like three, let’s say, again I’m not positive of the numbers, but they took the top three egg producing chickens and put them in supergroup. And then they went to the second generation, and they took the top three from that generation and put them in the supergroup. And then they kept doing this for six generations.
They would just measure the egg production, and whichever chickens laid the most eggs, they got put in the supergroup. And what they’re trying to do is breed a chicken that would produce more eggs. So it was a pretty straightforward, you know, thing. It seems like it should have worked. What they found was, at the end of six generations of doing this, the ordinary chickens were actually producing slightly more eggs per chicken than they had in generation one. You know it was like, you know, instead of one egg per chicken, it was 1.2 or something. It went up slightly.
What they found in the super chicken group really surprised them. And that was because, you know, they’re trying to get some chicken that’ll produce two eggs per chicken or something. You know, they were looking for bigger numbers. What they found was, only three of them were still alive. And that, you know, shocked everybody. But what they discovered was, they weren’t breeding super chickens, they were breeding predator chickens.
And so that’s why in chicken culture, you know, they talk about a pecking order. And it’s because the chickens will literally peck at the other chickens and they’re bullying them. And when the other chickens were being bullied, their egg production went down. And as soon as they got rid of all the bullies, guess what? Their egg production went up. And so, the bullies just turned on each other and pecked each other to death. So I thought that, I tell people all the time that must have something to do with corporate America ’cause that TED talk got millions of views. So…
(11:38) Stephanie Warner: Oh man. Awesome. Thank you. That was good. So in this chapter, you and Jim unpack two really core formulas, equations. So in the pursuit of transformation, can you explain why transformation is important here?
(12:03) Marcus: So transformation is, every leader is trying to create positive change. And so they’re trying to create a system, a strategy, something that will get better results than what they were getting before. That’s kind of what leadership is all about. How do I do that? And in Christian leadership circles, transformation is especially pivotal because we’re all trying to Create life change in the people that we’re leading. And so the formula for, how does one create life change? How does a leader help to generate transformation?
The traditional model comes out of the Enlightenment, and it started with the idea that the most fundamental thing about being human is reason. And so you get Descartes and you get rationalism and you get the idea that my ability to think is the most important thing about me. It’s what makes me human. It’s the cogito ergo sum, right? I think, therefore I am. And so from that comes the idea that if we can just get people to think correct things, we can transform them. And it works to a certain point, right?
We know there’s such a thing as cognitive therapy, and getting people to believe truth instead of lies is truly a powerful thing, but it quickly becomes, if I give you good information, that should be all you need to change. But we all know that doesn’t work. It’s like I know what I should be eating and shouldn’t be eating. I know what I should be exercising or not. I know all the things I should be doing. But having the information that I should be doing something doesn’t really produce change. And yet for several hundred years, that’s been the foundation of our expectation for life change is give people good information, to appeal to their reason.
And then there came a second movement after rationalism that’s called voluntarism. And that was the idea that the most fundamental thing about being human is the will and making choices. And everything became a choice. And you know salvation became a choice. You know, just make a choice for Jesus today. And while there is an element of truth there, the numbers don’t back this up.
(14:19) Marcus: Almost every evangelistic ministry out there has numbers that are somewhat appalling, of people who come forward, make a decision for Jesus, and show no evidence of ever following through with that. And so what it did is, and we made love a choice, we made joy a choice, we made you know everything, we kind of reduced it to its lowest common denominator. And in the process, we missed important aspects of that. That’s one of the reasons why we try to emphasize that salvation isn’t so much about a choice, it’s about an attachment.
I need to be grafted into the vine so that the vine and the branch can be, you know, intimately connected to one another. And I form that attachment, and choice has a role to play in this, but it’s the attachment that matters. And so the first model is that reason plus choice equals transformation, and that’s why preaching for several hundred years has been, here’s the information. Now here’s the choices you should make. Now go and be changed. And you know, sometimes that helps, but it hasn’t been a super effective model for actual transformation.
What is a far more effective, and this makes sense from a brain science perspective, but it’s also when you do a little bit deeper dive into scripture, you’ll see it there too, is that belonging plus identity is actually a much more powerful engine for generating transformation.
(15:53) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. So unpack that. Identity and belonging. How did we get there?
(15:57) Marcus: How did we get there? That’s a very good question. So, from the brain science that Jim Wilder was explaining to me, the where we got there is that there is an identity center in my brain, and the identity center in my brain takes shape and develops through my interactions with the people around me. And so my brain doesn’t know how to think about me independently of my people. So it always sees me as an extension of the group I am in.
Now that’s immediately going to offend a lot of people right there, because there’s people like, you got to be crazy. But you think about it this way. If you say I’m an engineer, well how do you know what an engineer is? There’s a group of people who are engineers and you have a, you know, some idea of what that means. And so your brain has some idea of saying, okay, that’s what I am. I’m an architect. I’m an artist. I’m a pastor. I’m whatever. That is putting me into a group when I make a statement like that.
The same thing when I say I am a saint, I’m putting myself into a group, and there are expectations that my brain has of what that means, and what that looks like, and how that works, and who my people are. So when I say I am a citizen of the kingdom of God, right? These are my people. Well, as soon as I know who my people are, then I have a clear understanding of what’s important to us, what we value, and also how we behave. How it’s like us to conduct ourselves. And so identity becomes a major driver in our transformation, probably the most powerful motivation in the transformational process.
And identity grows out of belonging. And so you think about it this way. Think of like a tribe in Africa, right? My parents, your grandparents, were missionaries in Sierra Leone. They worked with a particular tribe there. And if you grow up, you know, you know who your family is, you know which clan you’re in, you know which tribe you belong to, and you know that that tribe over there is not your tribe, and that it is like your tribe to do things this way, and it’s like that tribe to do things another way.
(18:16) Marcus: And so there’s this tribal kind of mindset that’s sort of built into the way all of us function, because it’s the way my brain learns who I am. And if I know who my people are, then I know who I am. And it’s one of the reasons why it’s so important to have close connections to a people group, if I’m going to grow a strong identity. And why it is so hard to experience real transformation in isolation. So what happens is I belong to this people, and then out of that belonging, this people grows a worldview, and then out of that worldview come our values, and then out of those values come our behavior.
But the first step in that is we belong to each other, we are a group. And we as a group look at life this way, and we as a group value these things, and we as a group, and Paul writes his letters this way. You Christians out there, you people, like it is like us to do things this way. It is not like us to live a different way. And so, this idea of a group identity is foundational to this model. I can give you some examples of how this works in practice, but any questions on the model though?
(19:29) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, well I mean, even while you were talking, I was just remembering an episode we did a while back. I’ll try to find it, where we were going through just how like the brain sees faces looking back at us, and how that informs our identity, and how, yeah, it really is just like inside our brain is, I know who I am, because of how I see other people seeing me. And so it’s huge. And it’s another reason why, you know, the Bible talks about, be careful who you’re building belonging with, basically of just like it informs more than just your day to day. It’s informing yourself. But yeah.
(20:17) Marcus: Yeah, it’s very true. And so it’s a belonging with belonging, there is always an inside versus outside element to that. Are you an insider or are you an outsider? Are you one of us or are you not one of us? And so even Paul’s like, be good to all people, especially those of the household of faith. You know, and that is, we can love the outsiders, but it doesn’t mean they’re not outsiders to who we are and who our people are. So we can be kind to them, we can be good to them, and we can love them. But there is something built in about your identity that comes from who is inside and who is outside. And so belonging has some element of that to it.
So what you find is that when a leader wants to come in and change a culture and they want to flip the culture, you hear that a lot. To flip a culture, you’ve got to create a strong sense of belonging, so that everybody in there feels like they are on the same team, and that they are, that they care about each other, and that they’re in this together. And then out of that comes an identity that says, and this is what we do, and this is how we do it, and this is what we’re all about.
So, for example, Jocko has a leadership, you know, example. He tells about the Navy SEALs. And how they would have groups that their job was to carry boats out there and it’s really strenuous and hard and they were constantly in competition. And there was one team that finished first routinely and there was another team that finished last routinely. And the captain of the team that finished last said, well, I just have a bunch of losers on my team, you know.
And so they had an experiment and they flipped. And they took the captain of the last place team and made him captain of the first place team. They took the captain of the first place team, made him captain of the last place team just to see. And what they found was the captain of that first place team who went, once he took over the last place team, he flipped the culture of that team. And the first time they competed, they finished second. And from then on, they never lost again. Right? They became the best team overnight.
(22:23) Marcus: One of the most recent examples of this for people who follow sports at all, is that being that we’re from Indiana, right? We got to show a little love to the Indiana Hoosiers, who were literally the losingest team in college football history. And in two years, they got a new coach, and the first year they went to the national football playoffs, and in the second year they went undefeated and won the national championship. You talk about flipping a culture.
(22:52) Marcus: And it was people like, if I belong, I’m a part of this, I am all in, and this is it, this is what we do, this is how we do it, this is who we are. And that’s what leaders do. Leaders don’t just get results, and that’s kind of what we’re after here. They don’t just get results, they build cultures that produce results, and that’s what we’re after. That the first priority of a rare leader is to build a culture, and only secondarily and how do I put this?
(23:22) Marcus: You’re trusting the fact that if you build the right culture, the results will come. And that’s very different because if I only fill the focus on getting results, I can create a very toxic culture. And I may get temporary results, but I’m not going to be able to do that year after year again and again because nobody wants to stick around in a toxic culture. And you’re constantly having to start over and reinvent yourself.
(23:47) Stephanie Warner: Yeah. there’s so much more we could say. I guess following up on the model, what relationship do you see between individual identity and group identity?
(24:00) Marcus: So in your brain, group identity and an individual identity are almost inseparable. And that is that, not in the sense that they’re one and the same, but that they are related to one another. So a group identity is the identity of my people. So if I say, for example, I am a citizen of the kingdom, that is defined, that’s my people group. And so, but your brain, I can’t just tell myself that. My brain has to experience it. It has to look around and see.
And when my brain sees myself as a kingdom citizen, now that identity begins to take over and shape the way that I live. That identity will begin shaping the way that I think. That identity will shape what I value, right? So my identity is going to grow out of this group identity. That says this is who we are, and this is what’s important to us, and we’re all in this together.
Now I will say that a group identity and personal identity can get really toxic. So when I say that this is a model for transformation, it’s not always a model for good transformation. It’s not always a model for positive transformation. In other words, I could build belonging and identity in a really negative way, and we see it all the time. Like, you know, I joined this gang and now I am a part of this gang and I belong, and these are my people, and this is how we look at the world, and this is how we do things. That’ll create transformation in your life, but not necessarily what we’re talking about here.
So one of the challenges we found is that sometimes, the, what we might call, bad groups are better at creating belonging and identity than the church is. And what we’re trying to do is help cast this vision out there and an understanding of how this works so that churches can do a better job of creating the people of God. And in creating the people of God and citizens of the kingdom, people who take that as their first identity and the identity from the group identity from which their personal identity flows.
(26:09) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Oh man, I’m wanting to press into like fear versus joy. I know we’re going to unpack that in future episodes too. I guess, since we’re getting to time here, what given all of this, what would be a takeaway that you would want somebody to, you know, what once you’re like, the traditional paradigm, versus the identity, versus belonging paradigm and/or plus belonging.
(26:37) Marcus: Well, what happens is the traditional paradigm tends to encourage accountability. And because we know people aren’t going to change just from telling them what they ought to do and telling them to make better choices, so we form accountability groups to kind of use fear and shame to motivate them into making the choices we’re telling them to make.
But I often say is when accountability works, it’s rarely actually because of the accountability. It’s because of the relationships that are formed in the process. And so I join an accountability group, but usually it isn’t actually the accountability that’s working. It’s the group identity that is getting formed. And it is my connection to these people and I don’t want to let them down. And so it does…
(27:25) Stephanie Warner: Mm. But in a good way. It’s a relational joy way, not a fear-motivated way.
(27:28) Marcus: Well yeah, I always think of like Band of Brothers or you know, all these war stories of people who bond together in the heat of battle who literally die for each other. And at that point they’re not dying for a cause anymore. They know they’re dying for that person next to them. They’re dying for their people. And so what’ll happen is, that’s what we mean by this identity is so embedded in me, that I can’t imagine not, you know, following a certain value set. And what we’re after is helping to create that.
So where joy and fear come in is that if I use belonging and identity, I can motivate people with either fear or with joy. And if I motivate with fear, then what I’m basically doing it’s like saying I’m going to punish you if you don’t. You’re going to feel pain if you don’t. Bad things going to happen if you don’t. And that may all be true, right? It may be true. But if that’s the only way you ever motivate somebody, you’re going to burn them out. Because you can’t just constantly motivate yourself with fear. And so if you’re always like, you know, you’re going to make me mad. And that’s your motivation, like that’s not going to do a lot for our relationship, one.
But two, it’s not going to produce long-term transformation in a person. They’re going to learn to hide from you so that they don’t get in trouble. What we want instead is to learn how to motivate with joy. And joy is about casting a vision of what is possible. Now there will always be a little mixture in here because fear is a reality, but we want to make sure that the primary thing that’s driving what we’re doing is joy. And the joy has to do with the good thing that will come of this if we do.
(29:29) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. good. More on that in future episodes. Hey everyone, we are so glad that you are on the trail with us. Thank you for everyone who donates, everyone who prays, everyone who shares with a friend. Thank you for being here with us. We see you and appreciate you. Father, I’m going to ask you for some final thoughts on this episode.
(29:54) Marcus: So, you know, my core takeaway from all of this when I was learning it and absorbing it was that as a leader, I didn’t realize how often I motivated myself with fear, and how often I was more focused on results than culture. And flipping just those two things. Like I need to build a culture that is rooted in joy. And that if I succeed in building a joy-based culture and the culture is healthy, it’s going to create results.
And that was a big change for me because I had not seen that model very often. But once I understood it, I started looking back in my life, especially in my sports history and my different coaches, and immediately could realize there were some coaches who built very toxic cultures and motivated with fear. And I had other coaches and I loved them and I worked hard for them, and they built a joy culture. You were happy to belong to, you are proud to be a part of that culture. And you worked hard because your identity as a group was, we are a group that works really hard and we encourage, you know, and I could immediately see it.
As soon as I learned this, it’s like, okay, that’s why I love this coach and why I couldn’t stand that one. It’s because they were, one was building a toxic culture anchored in fear, and one was building a very robust and demanding culture, but it was rooted in joy.
(31:15) Stephanie Warner: Ah, so good. All right. See you back next week.
