Episode #82 - Releasing Fear & Control Ft. Ryan Bond

Joining us for a second time is Ryan Bond, Chief People Officer at Thrive Restaurant Group for a deeper dive into the concept of leading with love and release in the workplace.

Ryan expands on the previous conversation from July 2022, discussing how this leadership approach has impacted their organization through multiple acquisitions. He shares the importance of creating a family-like work environment, introduces the metaphor of a leader as a gardener nurturing growth, and challenges leaders to release control and trust their employees. Ryan encourages listeners to experiment with releasing control in small ways to experience the positive outcomes of this leadership style.

Key Takeaways

• Leading with love and release involves trusting people and allowing them to become their best selves.

• A family-like work environment can lead to increased employee engagement and positive outcomes.

• Leaders should focus on creating the right conditions for growth, much like a gardener tends to plants.

• Releasing control and trusting employees can lead to better results and stronger relationships.

• The principles of love and release have far-reaching effects beyond just the workplace.

If you missed Ryan's first appearance discussing "Leading with Love and Release" in July 2022, be sure to check out Parts 1 and 2 of that initial conversation. This episode builds upon those foundational ideas and offers new insights into this powerful leadership approach.

Releasing Fear and Control Part 1 Transcript

What does leading with love and release mean? And what have you learned since our last conversation?

So love and release, when we looked at the restaurant business and we looked at that industry, what we saw was an industry that a lot of times can have a lot of darkness in it. It's a difficult industry for a lot of reasons. It's known for chewing up and spitting out the people that are in there. It's not known for a great quality of life.

John, our owner, and the rest of us, we're starting to think through, how do we want to be known in this space? How do we want to impact the lives of the people that we work with? We want to be a source of light and we want to help people for all the hours that we spend working in these businesses.

We wanted people to be better off for that time. We wanted their lives to be enriched to where they're going home with their best self, not leaving everything on the table at work. And so, we started thinking about our own lives, about people and leaders that have energized us and left us in a better place, and we realized that love is this guiding force of being other-centered and self-giving, and that a natural outcome of love is releasing people from your expectations, from what you want them to do, from controlling them and letting them become the people that they're going to become. And that can feel really risky for a business, but we decided that…do we want to do business any other way? And we decided no.

Love and release for us is this posture that we want to take as leaders that frees people to become their natural best selves at work. We want them to have responsibility for their work. We want them to master their work. We want them to feel ownership of it. And so love and release is this cycle that builds on itself that helps people rooted in trust, become who they're supposed to be.

We contrast that with the leadership posture of fear and control. For us, love and release is our method of being able to generate great human outcomes in the business and great business outcomes in the business.

You're using some pretty familial language when you talk about love and release. What does that look like? How does your behavior as a leadership team look different leading with love versus leading with mere respect or leading with empowerment or enabling in a positive way, but actual love?

When I started here people in the business were using this idea that we're a family. And I was like, we are not a family. You don't get to pick who's in your family, we don't fire people in your family. And so I pushed back on that for a long time.

We want to be a high performing team, that's what every business wants is a high performing team and this familial language makes people uncomfortable and it's easy to poke holes in. And I don't remember when it was, it may have been six or seven years ago. I had this wake up call. I found myself even using the same language and I realized, why am I fighting against this? If people believe that they are a family in this thing together, let's just embrace that and go with it.

Are you familiar with Bowen family systems theory? So, this is a theory that sought to understand the emotional processes at work inside of families. And so, a lot of times, we think about work being devoid of emotion, right? I think the biggest risk that we have in hiring is not technical skill. I believe that the biggest risk that we take in hiring is relational. Does this person have the emotional regulation, the ability to have interpersonal relationships...The risk is relational.

When you think about employment issues falling apart, it is almost always relational. When you think about a family, think about all the relational dynamics that come to play in a family and what Bowen Family Systems Theory sought to figure out, what are the emotional processes that happen in a family? What they determined through research was that anxiety is the most contagious emotion in a family system.

What happens when everybody gets anxious, they identified eight patterned behaviors that people will fall into. That can look like withdrawal. It can look like negative interpretation. It can look like cutoff, where you move away from your family. It can look like over-functioning or under-functioning. It can look like escalation, escalating in conflict. It can look like invalidation of feelings. It can look like triangulating where you bring other people into your conflict to help get it solved.

It's a rich, rich bunch of research that we see lived out in workplaces every single day because we believe that we are a family, and we adopt emotional processes that we've been raised with in our families to do work with. I started leaning into the idea of family because there's so much that we can learn from the relational dynamics that create a healthy family or a dysfunctional family. We see those all happen in businesses, on executive teams, on management teams. And the whole point of that for the leader is that when there is anxiety just rolling through there and people are responding in these patterned ways, the only way that that stops is when there is a calming presence for the anxiety to die into and for people to become less anxious so that they can access their thinking brain and they can relate in a way that helps achieve the family objectives or the company objectives.

We think that one of the most important decision that a leader in our organization makes is who they pick to be the leader for someone else. The best thing that we can do organizationally is give somebody a great healthy boss to work with. If we do that, then we believe is that we have created the conditions where people can become their natural best selves. And that love and release, that is inherently calming. It is a way of seeing others and connecting others to your belief in their potential and then connecting them sometimes to their own potential, which shockingly, a lot of people don't see in themselves.

Walk us through the last two years of your journey and the things that stand out that you've been learning.

We've done six acquisitions since 2018, and in that time quadrupled the size of the organization, best part has been watching each acquisition. So, there's that first meeting that you have with the organization that you're going to be partnering with to make a future together, and we talk about these ideas. And I would say people are like, that sounds real nice, we'll see how that plays out. So much so that we've actually started leading with that in a lot of the meetings. Right before we filmed the podcast a couple of years ago, we were getting ready to do an acquisition of 70 restaurants out in the Carolinas. We went out and we were doing our meet and greet with all the managers and assistant managers and we were telling the story. One of the things that we said was, “hey, we're going to tell you stuff about how we believe we can create one of the best workplaces in the world and we're gonna share it with you and you're gonna think to yourself, we'll see if that plays out.”

And this woman raised her hand and she stood up and she said, “hey, I just gotta tell you guys, I was a part of this other franchise group that they acquired a couple years ago and I had to move and now I got connected and I gotta tell you, everything that they're talking about is true.”

And I was like, can we take you to every meeting? Because I would love to have you there. But people aren't, at the core, trusting people, and that's what really the center of love is, it's about trusting people.

This metaphor that's been really impactful for us has been this gardener metaphor over the last few years. And the reason that it's been impactful is when you think about a gardener, right? What does the gardener actually do? Well, the gardener picks the plot of land. She does the work to get it all prepared. She makes sure that it's got sun, that it's got access to water--basically creating the conditions. The leader, the gardener creates the conditions for whatever they plant to thrive.

And so when you plant these seeds, which I feel like we are doing with Love and Release. (We have not arrived still.) Sometimes I wish it was easier, sometimes I wish it was faster, but I really see the work in this seed planting. And when you start planting seeds, one thing that you never do as a gardener is you don't plant the seeds and water them and let the sun, and then go dig them up every few days to see if they're sprouting and then stuff them back in the ground, right? Or once the plant takes root, you don't pull it up to say, okay, well, look at those roots, okay, great, we're gonna shove that back down, tuck it, like, you don't control the growth like that.

All you can do as the leader is create the conditions for growth to happen. And in some cases, that's, hey, what plants do you plant next to each other? Because some plants provide nutrients for other plants, other plants actually suck nutrients that another plant might need. How do you think about the spacing? How do you think about what kind of sun they're getting? I mean, it really all comes back to nurturing. And when we see people really step into their power, to step into their potential, what we see is a leader that is nurturing their beliefs, nurturing their confidence, nurturing the experience through their actions by showing them, not just telling them. And we see people achieve things that they never thought were possible, whether it's getting promoted, whether it's mastering a job that they thought might have been too difficult for them to wrap their arms around. But that's the fruit that we see.

When we see people not thriving, that is almost always due to neglect around the conditions. Like when there are weeds, which would be bad behaviors and attitudes and like almost all of that stuff pops up as a result of neglect. And it's a neglect in the conditions that have been created for positive behaviors, positive attitudes, people to grow.

And so the gardener metaphor, it just really means a lot to us because it is the hard work of gardening. And it's that steadfast patience that something is going to grow here if I continue as the gardener to create the conditions that are wet enough, have enough sun, have enough soil, have enough fertilizer. I know that something will grow and I don't have to try and control its growth. I know it will emerge organically. The thing that gets in the way of that is the fear that it won't.

We had originally talked about love and release as like, hey, I'm releasing you. But really the first step that we've learned is that I have to release myself from my fear of not being in control of your growth. Right? And it's that whole idea of like, hey, I'm not going to pour into you until you've made it 90 days or until you've mastered this or mastered that. That's just a way of controlling, right?

It's making sure I'm not wasting anything. And that flies in the face of love because love is other centered and self -giving. And so that's why the partnership between love and release is so important. But I think one of the big learnings that we've had is that release isn't just about releasing a person. It is releasing yourself from the subtle control that we all use in our day-to-day lives and our day-to-day leadership to mitigate negative outcomes for ourselves. So that's been the takeaway.

I wonder what you have to say to people who are listening to you, who don’t believe it’s attainable because I know that there's probably very few organizations, like you in their world that they can point to and go, see, it works and what you're describing might feel very unattainable…

Yeah. I've been there. I don't know what would have happened if we had taken this approach and not seen results with it in the first couple acquisitions, right? I think that would still be our heart, but I don't know that we would lead with it like we do. I will say we do have confirmation bias to the extent that that exists.

So here'd be my challenge. Someone asked me recently, what are the subtle ways that you control in your relationships? I was thinking about, you know, meeting on my terms, meeting on my timeframe, like in an environment that I'm comfortable with wanting to drive myself, not wanting to like ride with other people and you're wanting to be the mastermind. I don't think any of us would look at any of those things and be like, my gosh, like you've got a control problem. But, I do.

I think what I would challenge every leader to do is think about what are the ways that you subtly control in your relationships at work and your relationships at home? What, what do you see yourself doing to make things less scary for you about the unknown of something, right?

When we go on a family vacation, if it's with my folks or my wife's folks, I don't like to all pile in one car. I like to have my own car. I like to be independent. That is subtly controlling. I'm not opening myself to the possibility of what might happen. In the same way, when you think about, I want you to just think about one person on your team right now, one person on your team that if you released them, if you let go of one subtle aspect of your control over them in the work that you do together, maybe it's preparing a communication that's going out that you don't double check, maybe it's giving them ownership over putting together an analysis or and then presenting. I don't know what it might look like in your context but what would it cost you to give someone that freedom at the cost of your own perceived safety to see what happens?

Every time I've challenged myself to do that, my expectations have been exceeded. It's a really easy thing to knock down and say, well, that's really nice, but we work in an organization where that's never going to fly. And here's the great thing about all this. It doesn't have to be organizational. It's you, it's your heart that is connected with the people that you're responsible for leading or working with if you're an individual contributor role. You can be this force, this calming presence that we talk about doesn't have to be somebody in authority. It can be any member of the system, right? Any member of the family can do this. And so, how do you show up in that way?

You really have to experience it to believe it. And I just find that that fear of being out of control, which is inherently rooted in distrust, and distrust causes us to focus on self-promotion, self-protection, self-preservation, where trust inherently means that we are focused on another person.

Charles Feldman has a great book. It's called The Thin Book of Trust. And I love the way that he defines trust in that book. He says, trust is making something valuable to me, vulnerable to the actions of another. And I love that. And distrust is, what is valuable to me is not safe with you. So trust, that really gets down at the core of fear and control and love and release. Trust is in the middle and those things are circling around trust or distrust depending on how you choose to lead.

Listen to Ryan's Previous Episodes

Leading with Love and Release Part 1

Leading with Love and Release Part 2

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Ryan Bond is the Chief People Officer at Thrive Restaurant Group, where he's been instrumental in driving positive cultural change for over 13 years. As a "people optimist," Ryan specializes in creating work environments where individuals can thrive and do meaningful work. Drawing from his background in business leadership, consulting, and theater, he focuses on leadership development and fostering collaborative team dynamics. Ryan is passionate about human thriving, relationships, and empowerment, and serves on several community boards. His approach centers on encouraging people to pursue fulfilling work in healthy, sustainable ways.