Leadership Mastery: The Art and Science of Leadership

Better leaders build a better future, and we can all be better leaders. By learning and employing the “four stars of leadership,” you can become the leader you are capable of being.

Dr. Tom Collins is a pediatric cardiologist and Vice Chair of Faculty and Academic Affairs at the University of Kentucky, as well as a leadership scientist. With a deep passion for building and training leaders, Dr. Collins combines science-backed insights with real-world applications to empower aspiring leaders across industries. His recent qualitative study, based on interviews with 51 retired U.S. Military Four-Star Generals and Admirals, culminated in a forthcoming book, The Four Stars of Leadership. Dr. Collins also hosts The Science of Leadership podcast, where he engages with top experts to explore the principles that create capable, caring, and impactful leaders.

More at https://www.fourstarleaders.com

 

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou:

Welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange. This is Hugh Ballou. I’m the founder and president of Center Vision Leadership Foundation. Our work is transforming leaders, transforming organizations, transforming lives. And I have a fascinating guest today who’s got just some powerful information about leadership. We’re diving into a conversation that bridges the best of military leadership and the nonprofit world. My guest is Dr. Tom Collins, a physician, educator, and leadership scholar who has interviewed America’s top four star generals and admirals. From those conversations, he developed a transformational framework called the four stars of leadership, character, competence, caring, and communications. We’ll explore how these four dimensions of leadership can help non-private and faith-based leaders build trust, strengthen teams, and achieve sustainable impact in their communities. Dr. Collins, you’ve had a remarkable journey bridging medicine, education, and leadership. What led you to the study of leadership practices of four-star generals and admirals?

Tom Collins:

Well, thanks for the question, Hugh. First, let me say thanks for having me on your podcast, The Nonprofit Exchange. Really excited to be here. As far as what led me to this, I’m a physician, I’m a pediatric cardiologist, and when I came out of medical school, it was just after 9-11, I ended up joining the Air National Guard, served in the Air National Guard until 2014. And so that’s a backdrop against this idea of leadership that I was receiving training, having opportunities to lead in real world capacities in that regard. And then clinically, in an academic medicine, I was building my leadership profile. And as I had read hundreds of books on leadership, I really decided, what is the book that I can’t find out there that I would really love to read? First, it would be a book that was sort of a one-stop shop, sort of a Swiss army knife of leadership books, right, where you get all these great ideas in one place. But I also thought, I would really like to know what the four-star generals who are out there would say, and what would their stories be that they would provide context for these leadership principles. And so that’s where the genesis of the study kind of came to mind, or the book. And again, it wasn’t out there. And as a result of some institutional studies that I’d done when I was on faculty at Stanford University, I developed the expertise for doing these kinds of studies with interviews and so forth. And one thing led to another, I had the idea, I had the capability, it was on me to do it. So that was how it sort of transpired.

Hugh Ballou:

Lots of interviews, and I’m sure you employed a underutilized leadership skill of listening. So as you listened to all these important people, was there something that surprised you or there was something new that caught your attention?

Tom Collins:

Well, Hugh, there were so many things that surprised me. Every interview, I did 52 total, but 51 on the record. One person didn’t want to be on the record. I did 51 on the record. And every time I came away feeling like I had had a master class, a personal master class in leadership. So there were so many different ideas. My book, The Four Stars of Leadership, that you can see behind me, actually is only half of the book that I wrote. Otherwise it would have been too thick and people wouldn’t buy it. So I’ve got another book basically in the can from this, but there were just so many tremendous concepts. I ended up with about 125 distinct leadership principles and then distilled all those down into what became the four stars of leadership. But there are lots of ones that I could point to you. Something that jumps out to me is basically you have to set expectations with people. And that’s something where we fail all the time. We fail in all sorts of organizations. We don’t tell people what we want. And as a result, they don’t give us what we want, and then we get upset that they didn’t deliver on what we wanted, even though we didn’t tell them, right? So that came from Admiral Snuffy Smith, who’s since passed on, but he just said it very simply. If you don’t tell people what you expect, you can’t expect to get it. And it was things like that that were just so clearly distilled in easy ways to remember, and then they would provide these stories that were just incredible. But that’s an example of one.

Hugh Ballou:

Stories are so moving. And sometimes, you know, my fourth book out of the 10 I have published now is of stories of leadership. And I learned from stories. You know, I like the how-to books, but the stories are very powerful. So our audience is primarily nonprofit leaders and leaders of faith-based organizations. Are there some similarities? Some of them are on the front lines helping people. Some of them have limited resources, high stress, high accountability. Are there some similarities in the people you interviewed and our audience?

Tom Collins:

Absolutely. I think that people would say, oh, the military, that’s totally different. It’s command and control. A, it’s not, if you actually have been in there and you know what it takes to lead in those environments. But fundamentally, as derived in my work, character, competence, care, and communication. There’s not. any sort of human endeavor where those four things aren’t important, whether that be the military, whether it be in medicine, whether it be in non-profit, whether it be in tech, wherever it is, if you want to succeed over the long term, those four things are really going to be foundational to you. So as it pertains to the non-profit and faith-based organizations, for those that are out there listening, I think absolutely those are in there. I think that a lot of times organizations, especially nonprofits where you’re dealing with a lot of volunteers, That’s all that much more important to have those leadership capabilities because you don’t have the same leverage, so to speak, that some other organizations might have. Well, we’ll just give you more money or we’ll do whatever. No, it’s about finding purpose. It’s about people that, you know, the people that you’re trying to lead need to believe in you and the mission, right? And so that comes down to character. They need to know that you care about them and what they’re doing. And you need to be able to communicate that well, so forth and so on. So I think all of the four stars actually are fundamental to pretty much any endeavor. It just so happens that it’s couched in some of the stories from the military. But the truth be told, a peek behind the curtain, my book is actually not necessarily a military book at all. It’s just that’s the mantle that it’s covered with, if you will.

Hugh Ballou:

Leadership applies to every area. So you’re so right. There’s a lot of difficulty in running any organization, but you multiply that with all the rules of a nonprofit and all the regulations we have, plus the V factor. So your four principles, let’s name them in order. And just how about unpacking them so we can understand what they’re about first.

Tom Collins:

Sure. Character, competence, caring, communication. So if we talk about character, Character is fundamental. When we look at any sort of leadership, leadership, if we just boil it down to its basic principle, influencing others to achieve mutually beneficial goals. If we start with that as our definition of leadership, again, it’s not position, it’s not authority, it’s not power, it’s influencing others to achieve mutually beneficial goals. That is predicated on a relationship, a relationship that’s built on trust. And Stephen Covey has written about this, The Speed of Trust, and some other books. But trust is fundamental, and character is necessary for us to develop trust in someone else. We do not want to follow, as humans, intrinsically, we’re not inclined to follow people that we don’t trust, and we’re not inclined to follow people with poor character. They may coerce us, they may bribe us, they may do a bunch of different things to get us to do what they want us to, but they’re not really leading. And so it’s character that really drives us to trust, to have a relationship, so that then we can be influenced to achieve those mutually beneficial goals. So that’s first. The second C, or second star, if you will, is competence. people don’t want to follow somebody who doesn’t know what they’re doing, right? In the military, that’s, I want to know that this person is going to get me out of here alive. Right? In other organizations, let’s say it’s construction. I want to know that this person knows how to build this building, make sure that the crane isn’t going to collapse on us, whatever it may be, right? All these different competencies that we need to actually get the job done fundamentally. So there are two kinds of competence. There’s competence within your domain of expertise. So for me, that’s being a pediatric cardiologist. If the people I’m leading think that I don’t know what I’m doing with pediatric cardiology, they’re unlikely actually to follow me as a leader within my space. So I need that competence, but I also need the competence of leading, which is a different skill set. Just because you’re really great at being a neurosurgeon, let’s say, that has no bearing on your ability to be a leader. And unfortunately, in our society, so often, we will take the person who’s the highest performer in a given space professionally, and then we’ll attribute to them leadership capability just because, hey, they’re really good at spreadsheets or whatever it is, and then they get into the leadership position and they perform terribly because they’re two different things. So you need competence in your professional space and then confidence in leadership. So that’s the second thing. The third is caring, which I’ve had a lot of people say, wow, I can’t believe that the four-star military officers would talk about caring, but the reality is you absolutely must care because that is the I’m trying to remember exactly what General Pete Pace told me, but effectively, he was the 16th Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest ranking military officer in the United States. But General Pace said, you have to care about your troops. Troops won’t do what you need them to do until they know that you care about them, right? And so fundamentally, we want to follow people that we believe care about us, because that, again, is relational. As humans, we’re social animals, right? We need relationship. We’re built for relationship. And part of that is caring. And so there’s caring for our people. That is, are we making sure they have all the things that they need? You’re not caring for your person, your people, if they’re running Windows 95, okay? They need to have whatever equipment it is to do the job well, right? And that could be also sleep, food, whatever it is that they need to be sure that they can do the job that needs to get done. That’s caring for. And then caring about is what’s their story? Where are they from? What are their goals? What are their aspirations? That’s what caring about is for. And then finally, it’s communication. I could be giving you all this information about leadership and telling you all these great things, but if I’m speaking an ancient tongue that is now dead, and you don’t understand it, we’re not communicating. I’m just making noise. I’m a resounding gong, as it were, from Corinthians. But so that we have to understand our audience and we have to communicate in such a way that they understand. And so this is another principle that I got from, again, Admiral Snuffy Smith. And it’s one that is one of the most powerful concepts that I derived from my work. it’s very simple. It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear. So that, I mean, that one has reshaped so much of the way I go about communicating with other people. I need to know something about those people to know how whatever I’m about to say will land with them, which gets to all these other C’s that I’ve just gone through that are based on caring and trust and competence. We have to have that relationship so that I actually know something about them before I just go spouting off nonsense. So anyway, that’s a high level very cursory run through of the four C’s and four stars of leadership.

Hugh Ballou:

And the way you share that information turns on light bulbs. So let me unpack. So folks, there is a transcript. You don’t have to take notes for all of these great ideas. You can go back to thenonprivateexchange.org and find this episode. And then look at the transcript. You’ll find those wonderful pieces of advice. I want to highlight one, the competency. What are you competent in? And just because you got a great skillset doesn’t mean that skillset transfers to leading an organization. That’s a huge takeaway. It’s a paradigm shift. And I wanna ask about two things in your discovery, the mistakes leaders make and the myths that leaders come into, especially nonprofit. So the mistakes, let me highlight one and see what you see of that, over-functioning. So the analogy here is I’ve got an orchestra and a choir. I’ve prepared them for concert. I cannot intervene in the concert. I just have to make it happen. It’s too late to micromanage. And if I’ve micromanaged before, they’re not going to succeed. So in combat, you can’t micromanage your troops. So that’s a similarity I see. So are there others? So those misconceptions of leadership or mistakes we make, what are some of those? And then we might have those because we have some myths about leadership.

Tom Collins:

So I think there are a number of those, Hugh. I think that a big disconnect, and I hit on this a little bit earlier, a disconnect in our society is the idea that position equals leadership, authority equals leadership, power equals leadership. And the more that people depend on that, the more your ability to lead, quote unquote, is tied to your position, less you’re actually leading. So you want people to follow you because, and John Maxwell and others have written about this in levels of leadership, but you want people to follow you because of who you are and what your mission is and what you’re about. You as a person, what we would call referent power is who you are and what you’re about drives people to want to follow you, as opposed to authority, positional power, right? And so I think that that is probably an easy area to point to, to say, this is a place where people make a huge amount of mistakes. For a nonprofit, I can imagine I haven’t been in the non-profit domain per se. I mean, I’m in the non-profit domain in the sense that I’m in academic medicine, we’re non-profit, but I think of non-profits for most of your folks as a different sort of space, okay? So I haven’t been in that sort of space necessarily, but I can imagine what I know of non-profits is a lot of times, there are people who are highly successful in some business domain, and they get to the near sort of twilight of their careers, and they decide, I’m going to go and do good things and help other people in a non-profit environment. And so they come with a positional mindset into these organizations, and they try to activate on that. Hey, I’m the boss around here. This is what we’re going to do. And especially now with dealing with volunteers and things like that, that’s not gonna fly, right? And so I think at least what I know of nonprofits and mistakes that have been made in those spaces, that is clearly tied to the rough waters that they face a lot of times.

Hugh Ballou:

And there are tangents of this too, but I wanna, something jumped out at me as you were talking, which may not be related to what you were saying, the blind spots. we’re not aware of what we don’t know. And so that may apply to some of the stuff you talked about already. So how do blind spots impact our leadership?

Tom Collins:

In an insane way, actually. So I did this research study where we looked at leadership capability versus how people thought, how good of a leader they thought they were. Okay, this is among physicians, over 270 physicians across the country, and analyzed this. And basically what we found is consistent with something called the Dunning-Kruger effect. And so what that is, is they did a study back in, I think in the 90s is when this first came out. And essentially if you take people and you give them some assessment, some test, right, to see how well they would do on a given subject, then they’ll score across a range, let’s say from 100% to 0%, right? But if you ask them, how good are you on this? Pretty much everybody will say about the 70th percentile. and so basically the people who really are not very good assume that they’re at 70th percentile the people that are 50th percentile right in the middle they’ll assume you know their 70th percentile the people actually who are 95th percentile usually will assume that they’re at 70th percentile as well so you get almost a flat line whereas it is if you actually plot what they can do it’s on a diagonal okay a 45 degree angle versus this flat line on on a on a graph. And so what part of what that is, is that people take capability in one space. I’m really great at pediatric cardiology. And they take that capability, how they view themselves, and then they apply it to any given domain. and you may know some physicians, and we’re terrible about this, I don’t know if we are the worst, but we gotta be in the top five, okay, of people who will go, hey, I know everything there is to know about physics, or astronomy, or, you know, pick some literature, or politics, or whatever, right? Or you get actors, okay, people who make a living pretending to be somebody else, Why should we trust those people? But anyway, we do as a society. And these people, oh, they won an Oscar. We should listen to them when it comes to any sort of world event or societal change or things to do, right? Suddenly, these people are really good in one space, and then they think that translates to any other space that they can choose. And that’s what we see with regard to blind spots is that we don’t realize we have a blind spot because we think we’re really great at all these different spaces. And so that gets a little bit back to what I was saying earlier with regard to people who come in and they do things a certain way and it doesn’t go well for them because they’re used to thinking, I’m great in this area.

Hugh Ballou:

they want to blame everybody else. So, you know, awareness is connected, self-awareness in the last spot. So, you also, not unrelated to this, talk about humility as a strength. You want to tie that in here?

Tom Collins:

Yeah, I mean, I think that in It’s less so in our current environment. I think in our society where humility is something that is valued but historically and if you if you do studies on it people prefer somebody who is Humble in the sense that that’s not it’s like People often think of meekness as weakness, but it’s not meekness is strength under control and humility is the same thing Humility isn’t saying I’m the worst It’s just accurately assessing your value and importance. And we’re not good in our society of accurately assessing our value and importance. Somebody who’s humble isn’t saying, I’m no good at this. They just know that they’re good at it and they go about their job. And it doesn’t require putting other people down. Somebody who’s humble is able to build up other people without a loss of their own self-confidence or their ability to do their job well. And so that all comes right back into this and it gets into character. Humility is a significant part of character.

Hugh Ballou:

It’s part of being authentic, isn’t it?

Tom Collins:

Yeah, I mean, if it is who you are, in a sense, right? Like there are people who their authenticity would be to be a flaming, you know, megalomaniac. But it has to be authentic. Yes, humility has to be authentic. Otherwise, it’s, it will not go well, because people see right through it.

Hugh Ballou:

Yes, yes. So you can’t pretend to have humility or pretend to have compassion. So talk a minute, in the military, there’s a rule or a regulation or a policy or procedure for everything. You know, from very first time, the film manual, dash five from five, you know, you read about how you’re supposed to do things and then everything you go to, there’s a… So contrast that with nonprofits, we have sometimes very little we just kind of follow our heart. So what is the tension between freedom and form in our work as leaders? Because you can be too regimented and not be aware of what’s in front of you, right?

Tom Collins:

Sure, this is an interesting tension between predestination and free will on some level, I guess, right? But it is that I think that it’s like basketball, okay? Why do you learn the fundamentals of basketball? Or let’s say jazz, right? Jazz musicians really need to know theory. They may not be able to articulate theory, but they’ve got to be really good at theory, right? So that they can go crazy. But it all sound like music instead of a cacophony. And so I think that the best organizations are those that have frameworks, guardrails, whatever you want to call it, structure, that allow you to be good enough so that you can improvise. And so I think when we look at the military, that’s absolutely the case. Our best special operators, they are given room to improvise, but make no mistake, they absolutely know the fundamentals forward and backward.

Hugh Ballou:

You have to know those. That’s a great analogy. People who are not musicians assume that it’s just all made up with jazz. But if you don’t play the right chord progressions, you don’t take a solo when it’s your turn and not a solo. It’s still the fundamentals are there. But because you know those, then you can be fully present and make great music. So in the military analogy, because you’ve done the fundamentals, you’re out there in the field, it’s not scripted. I mean, you think it is, but no, it’s gonna be really different. And if you don’t adapt to it, it might be a life or death. So I wanna highlight your website for just a minute. It’s fourstarleaders.com. Now, for those people watching the video, they can see it, but let’s describe it for those people who are on the audio podcast, please. What will people see when I find out when they get there?

Tom Collins:

Sure, yeah, there are a lot of resources that we have available on the website and actually one that I’m working on today that I just came up with and I’m looking forward to launching and it’s just going to be under a section called for fun and I’ll describe that in a minute. But there are a number of things that are on there. You can learn more about. Four Star Leaders, which is our organization where we work to do leadership development and coaching. We can do that individually. We can do that in large groups and so forth. I have a podcast, The Science of Leadership, which is available on all the major platforms and video forum on YouTube. And we put that out weekly. And we have some incredible guests, many of the four star generals and admirals that I’ve interviewed for my work actually have agreed to come back and have been on some episodes there, and it’s just incredible that I get to talk to those people regularly. And then they’ll be able to find a link to my book, The Four Stars of Leadership. And as I say, I’ve got this fun thing that I just kind of came up with today, which is which soup are you? So it’s gonna be a, you know, it’s a personality. I just, it just came up today and now I’m getting my web designer on it, but it’s a personality profile that basically tells you which soup you are.

Hugh Ballou:

Which soup are you? Are you in the soup or not? You know, we forget that being having fun. We forget, we get so plain serious about this. Yeah. So that, so please check out the website. A lot of really good resources, a really good podcast that you’ll learn some more things. So Tom, what’s ahead for Four Star Leaders?

Tom Collins:

I think that the thing that I’m trying to do right now is trying to get my book out there. I think that in this current moment, in fact, we are in such need of leadership in our country and across the world. I believe that these four principles are irreducible. principles that not only make for good leadership, they make for good life. And so I’m trying to get the book out there in front of folks and, you know, speaking out in different environments and so forth to try to help people become better leaders. Because I think that’s one of the things I’m really highly capable of doing.

Hugh Ballou:

Like Richard Rohr has said, how we do anything is how we do everything. So that it’s applicable to all parts of your life. So Dr. Collins, thank you for being here today. And the insights that you’ve shared, I don’t care where we are on the spectrum, it’s always so valuable to go back to some fundamentals and rethink, because, you know, the world changes a lot. Your Four Stars Framework gives both nonprofit leaders and faith-based leaders clear, actionable pathway. to build trust, strengthen relationships, and achieve excellence. It’s about excellence in all we do. I just love it. And that you highlighted leadership’s not about power. Oh, it’s not about power. So the character, competence, caring, and communications, that’s a transformational concept. So for those watching, go to his website. fourstarleaders.com. You can connect with Tom. So, Tom, thank you so much for being my guest today on the Nonprofit Exchange.

Tom Collins:

Thank you, Hugh.