The Power of 3: Lessons in Leadership

Steven Mays grew up in an Air Force family, traveling widely as a proud military brat. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy, he served in the Navy’s Nuclear Power program and earned his gold dolphins aboard the USS Los Angeles, the Navy’s lead attack submarine. His career later focused on nuclear safety and risk evaluation with the Idaho National Laboratory and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Steven is a passionate storyteller and leadership educator who believes leaders are made, not born. He draws his insights from real-world experience, hard lessons, and the sailors and leaders who shaped his journey.

In this episode of The Nonprofit Exchange, I had the pleasure of speaking with Steven Mays, a leadership strategist, speaker, and author, about his innovative framework known as the Power of Three. Steven’s journey into leadership began at the Naval Academy, where he learned the importance of clarity and effective leadership through his experiences in military and civilian roles.

We discussed the common misconception that leadership is solely about personality and style, highlighting that true leadership is about influencing others to achieve more collectively than they could individually. Steven emphasized the critical foundation of leadership, which consists of honesty, courage, and talent. He explained that catastrophic leadership failures often stem from a lack of these foundational elements rather than a deficiency in talent.

Steven also addressed the challenges leaders face, particularly in the nonprofit sector, where unmet expectations can lead to significant issues. He stressed the importance of clear communication and providing the necessary resources for team members to succeed.

As we wrapped up our conversation, Steven shared insights on the achievement level of leadership, which involves assisting, inspiring, and depending on others. He underscored that effective leadership is about making others successful and recognizing that credit and blame are part of the leader’s responsibility.

For those interested in exploring Steven’s Power of Three Leadership Framework further, I encourage you to visit his website at powerof3leadership.com. This episode is a valuable resource for anyone looking to enhance their leadership skills and make a meaningful impact in their organizations. Thank you for joining us on The Nonprofit Exchange!

 

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou This is the Nonprofit Exchange, and my name is Hugh Ballou. I’m the founder and president of a foundation called SynerVision. It’s the synergy leaders create by being very clear and emphatic with their vision. So, we’re exploring today some simple, yet powerful leadership framework called the Power of Three. Our guest, Steven Mays, is a leadership strategist, speaker, and author who helps leaders move from intention to impact by focusing on clarity, accountability, and this is the big one for me, influence. Steven is the creator of the Power of Three Leadership Net Framework, which emphasizes three core dimensions of leadership, foundation, challenge, and achievement. His work supports leaders across nonprofit, corporate, and community settings who want to lead with integrity, courage and purpose while inspiring others to perform at their best. Steven, welcome to the non-profit exchange and tell us what inspired you to develop the Power of Three framework.

Steven Mays Well, I wanted to be a leader early on in my life. That’s why I chose to go to the Naval Academy and I was a nuclear submarine qualified officer. And I enjoyed that experience. And as I, after I left my active duty and went into other realms, I found myself in positions of management and leadership. And I found that I was learning mostly by trial and error. And as I came along, I just started to discover, geez, I, Things that I came across were things that weren’t that hard to understand. And maybe if somebody had told me about them ahead of time, I might not have had to make this mistake in order to learn this lesson. So I ended up after experiencing military, civilian, national, federal service, and consulting business leadership. I noticed there were things that were common about it, and I decided to Maybe I would write it down so I could understand it better, make sure I had a clear picture of it. And when I did, I said, why hadn’t anybody told me this before? Why didn’t I have any training on this before? I could have been much more effective had I had this, rather than having to learn it by the College of Hard Knocks. And so that was my motivation for doing this.

Hugh Ballou Well, you know leaders trying to make things too complex when really you and I were talking about it doesn’t need to be a complex. So talk about how to how it the simplicity is the best pathway and then one question you want to make sure we cover. Let’s do it right now. How do we prepare people to be leaders if they have this fictitious idea what it’s supposed to be?

Steven Mays Well, that’s one of the biggest problems we have is we don’t train leaders early enough. We wait until somebody is really, really good at something, and then we say, oh, now you’re the leader. You can’t get a degree in leadership from Harvard. as a bachelor’s degree. You can’t get a leadership degree from any major institution in the country in leadership. You can get math, science, English, history, sociology, any other ology you want to add, you can get a bachelor’s degree in, but not in leadership. But leadership is absolutely critical to people working together to achieve something, and we don’t teach it. We kind of like, well, they’ll figure it out as they go along. And we may give them a course in personal communications or something like that. But we don’t really foundationally tell them what leadership’s about. And so that’s what I wanted to do when I wrote this book, was make a leadership foundation and a concept that everybody could follow because it fits for whatever particular field of business or association you’re doing. So that’s what I set to do because I have a math and an engineering training. And so I always had some, there was always a formula you had to follow someplace. And I said, well, what’s the formula? What’s the theorem? What’s the maxims that you have to follow? And I said, well, why can’t we do that for leadership as well as we do for math or chemistry or anything else?

Hugh Ballou Well, and of course I have a degree in choral conducting as a musician, a music conductor. And so that’s a very related field. And it’s also the same thing. There’s a pattern, there’s a structure, and there’s a container, like your strategy. We have the music score, so we can be creative because people know what to do. Now, you let the cat out of the bag. OK, you got a book. Tell us what the book is.

Steven Mays Well, the book is actually very short. I wrote it because I got tired of looking for leadership advice that was always focused on personality and style. because everybody goes to the shiny object. They all talk about the icing on the cake. They want to talk about the icing, not the cake. They don’t want to talk about the sizzle and not the steak. And so I wanted to look for the cake and the steak. So I put together this concept so that it’d be something that everybody would be able to have, regardless of field of endeavor. to be able to use to say, how can I be a better leader today? And how can I work more effectively in my field? And so that was the whole purpose.

Hugh Ballou So we’re going to look at the website, and I’m sure there’s a place on the website you can direct us to for your book. But, you know, you’ve got this whole system that you’ve created, the power of three. So we’re talking to people in the nonprofit community. And, you know, you and I work with business leaders, we work with entrepreneurs, that it’s really difficult to lead in those situations. But there’s a quantifiable exponential difference and the difficulty in the nonprofits because you got all these rules. The government, you got these volunteer people to work with. So how does your process work? And it’s not just theory, it’s practical. How does it help nonprofit leaders?

Steven Mays Well, the biggest thing it has to do is it gives you a foundation and a basis for why you’re doing the things you think you need to do. The hard part is not the vision. The hard part is not the idea of what you want to get done. That’s actually pretty easy. In any organization, at whatever level you’re a part of it, what needs to be done is almost always a given, almost. But how you go about making that happen is what the leader has to do. And basically, leaders are people who influence others to be able to do more together than they could do on their own. In mathematical terms, we used to refer to this as the whole as being greater than the sum of the parts. So you may have a virtuoso violinist and a virtuoso trumpeter and a virtuoso bassist and a cello player and whatever else there are, but none of them are as good alone as they are together. And being able to influence people to work together so that their talents complement each other and add to each other so that they’re more together than they are apart is what leadership is all about. And that’s true whether you’re in an engineering firm or you’re in a government firm or you’re in a manufacturing firm or if you’re in conducting music. It’s the same principle. You’re getting more out of people individually by getting them together collectively to perform better. And it’s influencing them to use their craft to be better than they could ever be all on their own.

Hugh Ballou That’s a good place to end it. That’s something people can get their head around. Steven, this has been a powerful conversation. Thank you for sharing the clarity and practicality of the Power of Three. For our audience, I encourage you to reflect on your own leadership foundation, how you respond to challenge and how you define achievement with your team. To learn more about Steven Mays and the Power of Three Leadership Framework, visit powerof3leadership.com. Steven, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with our audience today on the Nonprofit Exchange.

Steven Mays Thank you.