Lead & Follow Podcast — Season 1, Episode 9
Guest: Dr. Lewis Steinhoff · July 26, 2021 · 36 min
Dr. Lewis Steinhoff spent three decades at the Department of Energy before studying where a leader’s power actually stops. He traces his research on power limits — a survey that turned a symmetrical box into a rhombus — through everyday supervision, teaching courageous followership at the Air War College, and nuclear deterrence talks with North Korea, where a follower’s refusal reshapes what authority can accomplish.
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Questions Covered in This Episode
Why doesn’t a job title automatically give a manager influence over their team?
Lew Steinhoff puts it plainly: people have positional power, but if they don’t have the right skill set for the position, “the followers are going to know it. They’re going to see it.” A supervisor who “shoots from the hip” or skips the technical thinking gets employees who “may reluctantly follow” — and then you’re into what Ira Chaleff calls the courage to challenge. Lew says he’s had to do that a couple of times in his career, and “it’s not pleasant.”
How much power does a boss actually have over an employee?
Lew, who thinks like an engineer, started with pushing a box across the floor — force, work, power — then found John Gaski’s “volume of power” model, where a supervisor’s applied power is only as strong as what the employee will accept. What bothered him was that Gaski’s smaller box was symmetric on all three axes. His own survey found acceptance isn’t the same in every circumstance: an employee might happily produce a multi-page Excel workbook at high quality but say no way in two days. So the shape wasn’t a box at all — it was “more of a Rhombus shaped kind of thing.”
Is followership taught in military leadership education?
When Lew was co-teaching nuclear deterrence at the U.S. Air Force Air War College, he asked his students what they were learning about leadership and got “this really doom and gloom look” — theory, and nobody telling them how to apply it. So he wrote a ten-week course blending a review of leadership theory with case studies, group exercises, and followership. Courageous followership had never been taught there. He went straight to Ira Chaleff and said he wanted his book.
What kind of recognition do employees actually value most at work?
Lew’s point is that it varies by person — some just want a pat on the back, some want public display, some want bonuses, and some want to be left alone to get on with it. Then he offered his own example: a political appointee whose testimony he used to draft was big on handwritten notes, left on his desk or hand-delivered. He still has them, and they mean more to him “than any other type of reward” he’s received. Sharna heard in that a “circulation of value and esteem” running both directions.
How does the idea of followership apply to negotiations between countries?
Lew carries power limits straight into nuclear deterrence policy — you’d talk to Kim Jong-un differently than to an ally, and once you see he’s focused on keeping his regime intact, the question becomes how to get the nukes out while telling him he’ll be okay. He quotes Solzhenitsyn: “you only have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power.” Sharna’s takeaway was that acknowledging any potential follower has agency “really changes the whole calculation of power.”
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Read the full transcript
Welcome to lead and follow a podcast that explores how great collaboration actually happens. I’m your host, Sharna Fabiano, author of the book, lead and follow the dance of inspired teamwork. And I’m pleased to bring you the latest research insights and learning methods to help you work together better with the people around you. I help founders, solopreneurs and new leaders become great at collaborating because I’ve seen how much more becomes possible when people integrate their ideas, perspectives, and strengths in a practical way.
To learn more about coaching with me and for a one-time discount on your first session, go to sharnafabiano. com slash coaching and enter the promo code podcast. The link is in the show notes. And now here’s the episode.
Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Louis Steinhoff, the director of the Nuclear Weapon Acquisition Professional Certification Program at the U. S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, the NNSA.
He’s also an adjunct professor with the San Diego Christian College, where he teaches graduate level leadership courses. In his 30 years at the Department of Energy, he’s managed many technical programs that support our national security. And he recently completed a two-year assignment at the United States Air Force Air War College, teaching nuclear deterrence, leadership and followership. He is a guest instructor at the National Defense University and has written, published and presented his research on leadership and followership internationally.
In fact, Dr. Steinhoff and I met at the Global Followership Conference in 2019. And I’m so glad we’ve kept in touch since then because he has really valuable perspective on power and influence based on his understanding of not only leadership, but the leadership and followership dynamic. So really excited to ask him about his work and his research.
Lou, a very warm welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining me. Well, it’s nice to be here. I appreciate the invite.
Absolutely. You know, I was thinking about the work that you do and indeed you have done for so long. And I found myself realizing how much my life and my own sense of safety, you know, is influenced by what happens at the Department of Energy and of course many other agencies in ways that I’ll probably never fully grasp. So I’d like to start by asking you just to give me and listeners a little insight into your work, your day-to-day and maybe how it’s evolved over these past three decades.
Okay. I’d be more than happy to. Back in 1991, when I started at Department of Energy, I had come out of the contractor industries, working to support the Department of Defense. And so I had done work with General Dynamics, Electric Boat Division.
And so suddenly I’m coming into the Department of Energy, into the federal government, and I’m hired into a nuclear program. And it’s a program to come up with a way of producing a particular nuclear material needed for our weapons programs. And it became very clear that this was work that was important to the United States and not only our security, but the countries that are sort of under our umbrella of protection. And as the years continued on, I would find myself working with the Brits and the French.
I was doing work with what we used to say here across the river with our Pentagon counterparts and working with the Nuclear Weapons Council. And my passions began to evolve over time. I kind of went from a knuckle-dragging engineer, as they call us, doing pure technical stuff. Then I found myself being more interested in management.
It came time to think about a master’s degree and I was thinking, well, I’m in D. C. It doesn’t really make sense to do a technical, you know, purely technical. So I got an engineering management.
It’s kind of a nice combination. And then as time went on further, you know, the itch to go back to college and work on a PhD was there. And I had always had an interest in leadership. And by this time, all of my passion was more into development of people, workforce capabilities, developing people, developing leadership, and then more recently, followership.
That job as director of what we call the NWAP program, Nuclear Weapon Acquisition Professional Certification Program, involves content development and involves recruiting of instructors, of which I am also an instructor. And then scheduling and teaching those courses. And, you know, over the last 14 months, we’ve had to do that virtually. So it’s been some challenges, you know, to keep up the interest and desire to do this and to carry on the actual teaching part of this at the same time.
Yeah, I can imagine. I find it so interesting how people’s careers develop and your progression feels very organic to me where it came out of the technical world and then into people and management. And I can see how that makes a lot of sense, especially now that you’re so involved in education. I want to ask you a little more about the flow of understanding from leadership into leadership and followership.
Kind of just have you a little to talk about how your thinking evolved in that and maybe how, you know, how that informed how you make decisions now about the certification program you mentioned and other teaching. When I would sit there and I would think about the types of decisions that program managers have to make when they’re managing their project that supports the nuclear stockpile. So I began looking at this and I began thinking about what kind of competencies those individuals need to have. I would spend time in one organization and then I would go to another one.
And I remember writing chapters on workforce planning. What kind of a workforce were we going to need in the future to do the kind of maintenance on the nuclear weapons that we were going to need to do in the future. And so I began thinking about that and thinking, wow, this is pretty interesting. And the idea of having people take the right kind of training to be prepared for that really began to appeal to me.
And I started working a little bit more with that being the point of contact in these different organizations to handle the workforce training part of the job. And, you know, that combined with another job that I had for a year or two at NNSA, I was supporting our political appointee when he would go up to the Hill, I would write his testimony. It was a fascinating procedure. I would do the initial draft, he would read it and edit it, we’d go back and forth.
And so the process of learning how to converse with government leaders, you know, congressional officials and the types of jargon you’ve got to use in one particular committee versus another or when you’re talking to different people. That combined with what I was doing with the workforce planning, it seemed to steer me into leadership and the idea of becoming the right kind of leader, you know, in the right kind of circumstance. When I first started working on the PhD, I had a whole lot of interest in the attachment theory and the leader member exchange theory, you know, and these things that looked at distance between a supervisor and their employee and what’s the right distance to be. Some employees are real needy, they’ve got to be almost hugging you, you know, they need that kind of attachment.
And then there’s other kinds that just want you to, no, just let me be and I’ll do whatever you need done. And I started looking at rewards. Some people like pats on the back, you know, when I was a supervisor, I got, I was able to learn this kind of on the job. Some people, all you need is a pat on the back, you know, other people want, they want public displays, other people like bonuses.
So it’s just, you know, all of these things kind of factored in, sort of made me key in on that. And then I became exposed to, you know, what Ira Chaloff was doing and some of the others. And, you know, it was being either at conferences where they were at, or actually being a speaker on the same meeting that they were at. And it was quite an honor to get to know these people and to read their work.
In the case of Ira, I said, look, I’m going to teach followership. I’m going to teach courageous followership at the Air War College. And I want your book. They had never been taught followership.
This is something completely new to them. It sounds like the more you studied and experienced leadership, the more you saw it as a highly variable phenomenon. Your story about going back and forth in your writing with the political appointee really stands out to me because that seems like such a perfect example of how both the leader and the follower role need to be responsive and adaptive to the other in order to get those quality outcomes that we all want. In this case, perhaps the appointee is officially in the leading role and you in the following role.
But there’s clearly a mutual respect there and a sense of exchange and balance that I associate with the most successful working relationships. Similarly, your observation of each individual employee actually needing something different potentially from a supervisor, for me, really speaks to the idea that leadership isn’t just one thing, but rather that it needs to be personalized to the situation and also to the specific followers in question, if it is indeed going to be effective leadership. Either way, that variability really seems to be a key. I do wonder what was going through your mind when you decided, hey, I’m going to teach courageous followership at the Air War College.
As you say, no one had ever heard of that before, so I imagine it was a rather bold choice at the time. Leading up to my first leadership course at the War College, I had the opportunity of being a co-instructor on the nuclear deterrence course that we were teaching. And as part of that course, I was also an advisor for several students. And I would just ask them off to the side, what are they teaching you here at the War College about leadership?
And they would always give me this really doom and gloom look. They said, well, we learn theory. We learn leadership theory. So I said, so they’re not telling you how to apply it?
And they said, no, we don’t really get taught that. So the idea came to me that let’s teach a course on applying leadership theory. So at this point, I was familiar with followership, and I thought they also needed that. So I wrote up a course.
It was about 10 weeks. And I blended in a review of leadership theory and talked about applications using case studies and group exercises. And then we blended in the followership as well. COLLEEN O’BRIEN You know, that makes total sense to me, that once you really get into the practical application of leadership on the ground, you’ll immediately run into a conversation about followership as well, because you’re suddenly talking about how to relate to real people, right?
Real followers, not just theoretical followers. And you’ve got to figure out how to lead those people in front of you, those followers in front of you, which brings in the conversation of the variety and personalization and customization to each person that you’ve been describing. I want to switch gears a little bit and ask you about your research. I read your recent paper in 2020, with a very provocative title of Assessing Leaders’ Power Limits Over Followers.
And one thing that intrigued me in that paper was your discovery, actually very much in keeping with our conversation here so far, it was your discovery that power or influence is not a fixed thing based on title or position. You can’t just measure it once and be done. At least this is how I’m interpreting it. You can correct me, of course, if I’m off here.
But that it seemed that power or influence actually shift based on how the leading and following roles are being expressed at different times, based on different interests, different actors, even different nations. So could you share a little bit about your process and maybe what was most significant for you in this research? Yeah. One of the fun things about writing this paper, at least it was fun for me because I think like an engineer, I started off with a pretty simple engineering problem.
Basically, you’re pushing a box across the floor. And that requires a force, an effort from you to push the box across the floor. So I began thinking about that. I was thinking about work and power, how work is basically that force over whatever distance you push.
And then the power is whatever that work is over a certain period of time. And I thought about that. I said, well, that’s exactly the way it is with supervisors and their subordinates, their employees. And it’s the process of applying a force, right?
Some kind of a force. We don’t call it a force, but some kind of a force on the individual to get them to do something. So as I began thinking about this, I came across this guy, Gasky is his name. And I believe he’s an instructor at, I think it’s University of Chicago.
But he had this theory about the volume of power and he had kind of an XYZ axis and how the applied power that you exert as a supervisor on an employee is only going to be as strong as what the employee is going to accept. And I was thinking, well, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, if they’re not going to accept your authority and your power, or they’re only going to accept it to a certain limit, then that makes sense. But the boxes that he had on his little graph, the big box being the boss, the little box being what the employee is willing to accept.
Obviously, the boss would want that little box to be almost as big as his own so that he would be getting full acceptance from his employees. What in fact happened was it was a smaller box, but it was symmetric. And that’s the part that bothered me. It was equal on XY and Z axis.
And so I created a survey that’s not included in the paper, but it was a series of questions getting down to the nitty gritty of what an employee would be expected to accept. And the results were, just as you summarized, they’re not going to be the same in every circumstance. As a matter of fact, if you come up to a, I’ll give you an example, if your boss comes up to you and says that I need you to create this multi-page Excel workbook that talks about the test results of whatever. I need that done and it needs to be high quality, but I need it in two days.
The worker may say, okay, fine, and I can easily do that. I’m really good at this stuff. I can do it. And it’ll be adequate to make the right decision.
Okay. I can fully support that. No way you’re going to get it in two days. I can’t accept that constraint.
So that would immediately make the box shape different. And I think that’s what the results showed. And so my volume box, if you will, was not a box at all. It was more of a Rhombus shaped kind of thing.
Right. Yeah. To take into account those other variables, right? There’s many other variables.
Right. Yeah. I wonder, I’m just thinking about that example. It’s like the request is made, like I need this spreadsheet and I need it for this purpose.
And then the response was almost like this hybrid, like, yes, but like there was sort of a detail that the request almost needed to be modified, like in order for then, I don’t know if you’d say like power to flow or for movement to happen or for the work to be done. I wonder if there are other, if you could name some of those variables, like what were these factors in either the leadership or the followership side that made the work more streamlined or easier or more likely to produce good outcomes? It was a qualitative study. And out of all of the questions that I answered or that I asked and that were answered, there were 61 themes or what I call topics that kind of came out of that.
The first coalescing of those resulted in six themes, relational, positional, military, communication, perceptions, mission, and autonomy. And each one of those had little sub-variants that went with that. And there were two, what we call codes that came out of that, transformational leadership approach and follower response. So it was those kinds of things came out and in different levels.
And so when you had things that, for instance, under communication, those were needs, group think, share knowledge and feedback, a combination of negative and positive result. And there were other little things like that too, autonomy, confirmation and challenge, recognition for work, perceptions, behaviors, experience, negative traits, relational, how much the boss related, conflict, involvement, understanding, and rewards, all kind of came under that. Yeah. It again kind of brings me back to one of your earlier points, which was just the variability in people’s responses to each other and how there isn’t so much a formula, right?
But if we can start to think about these themes, perhaps, you know, when we’re either in a leadership position or in a followers, fellowship position, that might start to give us cues or clues on an individual basis about what would work best for this person, you know, and how we might start to do better work with this particular person or this particular team. But that, you know, there is a certain wisdom in just acknowledging there isn’t a formula to begin with, but, you know, there can be a framework perhaps. And it’s very important. I think it’s extremely important that a supervisor develop that understanding with their employees.
You’re going to have some supervisors where it’s really hard to do this. They’re very lazy, fair. They want to tell you what needs to be done and then back off, not give you, not be involved in it anymore. But then you’ve got your very autocratic style that won’t leave you alone.
I mean, I want this done. Here’s how you’re going to do it. And by the way, I’m going to be peering over your shoulder, you know, to make sure you do it correctly. I don’t know very many employees at all that would appreciate that.
Right. I’ll be honest with you. I remember not having real good thoughts about leaders that were lazy, fair. And then I came across leaders that fit the definition and I had the utmost respect for them.
I was thinking, wow, this is, I’m learning something here. You know, you sort of put your initial judgments off to the side when you see something that’s working very effectively. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I would even venture to guess that in the right moment, you know, and an autocratic style, right. A very like command style is also necessary. Like maybe not all the time, but I can imagine a situation where that’s important. I think your paper makes it really clear that leaders do in fact have limits on the power they may hope to wield based on the response of their followers.
And therefore they need to always be very aware of the needs and interests of those with whom they’re working or those who they seek to influence. I’d love to hear another example of what it looks like when this leader follower attention is really well matched or when a leader, for example, makes a decision that’s very highly customized to a specific group or a specific follower. You know, we’ve not only had COVID to deal with over the last 14 months, but we’ve had a lot of racial things to deal with and diversity and things like that. Our leaders caught, latched onto that very, very early.
And they acknowledge the work of one of our younger employees, a person that had done a lot of work in this and had had a lot of good ideas. And he basically kind of elevated him to a leadership position to begin working the diversity and inclusion program that we were going to implement and to, you know, make opportunities for discussion, you know, and that kind of thing. And that’s just one example, but I’ve seen it on the technical side as well. Yeah.
It sounds like, tell me if I’m reading this right. It sounds like when there’s an employee who’s, you know, just maybe, I mean, I’m imagining here a little bit, but that employee who’s expressing themselves or what’s important to them through their work, you know, without necessarily expecting a promotion or even without necessarily being asked to do that, but just in the course of their work, they just choose, you know, to focus in this way or to really give in a certain way that that has often caught the attention of a leader. And that then has resulted in either, you know, a promotion or recognition or something else that, you know, in turn then gives back to the organization or makes the environment even richer. Yes, I think so.
You know, of course, with the federal government, you can’t just promote somebody. So they have to apply for the position and all that. But when there’s these kinds of accomplishments, they go on that resume. They go, people don’t forget.
They remember, I remember that person. Yeah. They definitely deserve it. You know, that kind of thing.
Yeah. I feel like that’s a good lesson just for all of us, because we’re not, you know, even if we have a leadership role, we’re usually following somebody else. So that attitude of, you know, bringing to your work, what’s important to you or, you know, choosing to give in a certain way that that is something that we can do as, you know, in a followership role. And it often does have an impact, you know, beyond our own self, you know, and even I imagine it brings more meaning to the individual’s experience of work.
What do you think about that? Yeah, I would agree with that. I think that, well, just generally speaking, not putting a lot of technical stuff in this, a more personable leader, one that’s, you know, walking around the office every now and then, letting people know that he cares, he or she cares. That goes a long, long way.
That really does help. I mentioned to you that I used to write the testimony of this one political appointee. He was the type of person that he was big into handwritten notes. And I got some really nice handwritten notes from him.
And I kept them. I have them to this day. And they mean probably more to me than any other type of reward that I had gotten. You know, it’s, you know, nobody either waiting for me on my desk when I’d come back in my office or he would hand deliver it, you know, that kind of thing.
Yeah, beautiful. That reminds me, and again, this is sort of, it sounds simple, but there’s an aspect of work that is so relational, right? And leading and following is a relational dynamic. And sometimes forget, especially when we use phrases like work-life balance, or, you know, I’m at work and now I’m at home, that we don’t just suddenly become robots, right?
When we go to work, like we’re still people. And so we still respond to other people in the same ways. And these, you know, these little things that it sounds like you had a really strong connection with this person you were working with, you know, who gave the notes and that there was value, you know, in both directions there in that, you know, whether you call it a leader or follower relationship or something else, that there was like a circulation of value and esteem that built the relationship. And I think that it’s, of course, not always possible, right?
With every single person you work with, but when we bring in the perspective that any work relationship could have that relational value and could be satisfying in that way, it just opens the possibility a little bit more. Lou, where else might we look to reconsider the power of the leader, maybe beyond an office environment even? After I had talked about the actual study that I did, I segued over into a little bit of training and a little bit of international politics. And this whole idea of power limits can convey over into, you know, nuclear deterrence policy.
You know, you might talk to Kim Jong-un a little bit differently, you know, than you might talk to one of our allies. When you begin to recognize after doing study that he’s focused on keeping his regime intact, then people can begin to think, well, how can we get the nukes out of there while still conveying to him, you’re going to be okay. Regime-wise. And so these kinds of processes begin to go through your head a little bit on not only, you know, we’re talking not only how to talk to your subordinates, your employees, but also how to talk to your hierarchy, you know, the people that are above you, people that are, you know, not only Americans, but also people that are, you know, in different countries.
You know, I really appreciate how you’re helping me to see this concept on an international scale and at the level of governance. Because I think for an average citizen like myself, the idea of leading a nation can seem very abstract, very far from my experience. And so I know personally, I tend to just think of leaders of nations, just as that leaders of nations, but when multiple heads of state interact and potentially try to do things together, they have to lead and follow each other, right? Or at least some of them need to follow or else nothing happens.
And we have standoff, which of course happens all the time. And I imagine it’s very frustrating. So right now I’m putting myself in my imagination in the position of the US government, as you’ve given the example, who would like to lead or exert influence on, say, the North Korean government to remove nuclear weapons. But if they don’t want to follow us, there’s a limit.
We can ask them to do it, but they can say no. So being a powerful leader, you know, in a sense comes down to figuring out what will inspire the yes, what will inspire that potential follower to accept our lead, even if that potential follower happens to be another head of state. Lew, is there anything else coming to mind on this topic as we wrap up that you’d like to share? Well, there’s a quote that’s in my paper that I included.
It’s from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Russian novelist and historian. And he put it this way. And if you stop and think about it, you almost have to read it a couple times. It applies at the lowest possible example to the highest one.
He says you only have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power. And I think so many of these despots down through history have thought just the opposite. You know, if you crush them, if you put them under your thumb, you’re going to have ultimate power.
But if you take everything away from them, nobody has anything to lose. And you really don’t have the power you think you do over them. And I think the same is true, you know, internationally. That’s why a lot of these negotiations that we have either with Iran or North Korea, or some of the other countries that have down through history toyed with the idea of starting a nuclear program.
It’s so important to understand where they’re coming from. People like North Korea, they sincerely believe that by having nuclear weapons, they have a seat at the table. They’ll be taken seriously. And people that are maybe Far East Asia, or somewhere like that, that may be questioning the extended deterrence that either we or another country may provide them when their neighbor possibly has weapons.
How do you assure them? How do you compel other countries against starting a weapon program? And all that ties back into this, you know, power, and accepted power, and followership, you know, whether or not they’re going to be willing to follow your lead or not. Very much so.
I think just the acknowledgement that any potential follower has agency really changes the whole calculation of power. Yeah, it’s quite difficult to grasp what it’s like to have those negotiations at such a high level and with such high stakes as nuclear deterrence. But one thing I’m definitely taking away from this conversation is the understanding that to be a powerful leader, no matter what level or what situation, I need to actually act in such a way that whoever my intended followers are, they want to follow me. I need to figure out what that is, and then act accordingly.
It’s not something that can be just forced, as you’re pointing out. You can’t just take everything away from people, for example, and expect that to result in voluntary, supportive following, and, you know, in any kind of long-term positive outcome either. People have positional power, but if they’re not, if they don’t have the right skill set for that position, the followers are going to know it. They’re going to see it.
And if you become a supervisor that shoots from the hip a lot or that doesn’t put technical thought behind something, it’s going to be a challenge. You’ll find the employees, you know, may reluctantly follow, but then you get into another courage that Ira talks about, the courage to challenge. I’ve had to do that a couple of times over my career, and it’s not pleasant. It really depends on how much you want to be out there, but if you basically tell them what they need to know to make the right decision, then ultimately it is their decision.
Lou, thank you so much for bringing this perspective to the podcast. I really appreciate everything that you shared. And before I let you go, I just want to ask what you might be working on now. In my current research right now, I’m writing on callings.
Do callings go away at the death of the person being called? And is there such thing as generational callings that go from one generation to the other? You know, it’s fascinating what you can learn through this. When you’re sitting there at your desk and you’re wondering, how does what I’m doing fit into all this?
You’d be surprised just by sitting back and thinking about that. You know, especially if you get up from your chair and go over and talk to the person the next day, you’d be amazed at the connections you can find and that you can see and that can bring value to the organization. It’s so immediate, right? And it’s something we can all do is just sometimes literally sit back, you know, back in the chair almost and think, okay, what is it?
What is it that I would label my calling? And can I go deep enough into that to give myself some of those answers? Love it. Thank you so much.
Well, good. It’s my pleasure. I enjoyed it. You have been listening to the Lead & Follow podcast.
Special thanks to Glover Gill for composing our music and a huge thank you to all of you who support the show. It really means a lot. If you enjoy this episode, please share it with a friend or consider joining the Lead & Follow fan club for as little as $3 a month. There’s a link at the bottom of the show notes.