“Your friend, Mel.” “The lady with the glasses.” Mel Robbins is down-to-earth, relatable — and an absolute powerhouse. Her podcast reached No. 1 in the world this year, her latest book, The Let Them Theory, led The New York Times Best Sellers list, and she is a Real Leaders Top Keynote Speaker and coach.
After 15 years of Army-crawling in the dirt, as she puts it, she recently erupted on the scene as one of the more followed and sought-after experts in mindset, behavior change, and life improvement; and her media company, 143 Studios, has worked with some of the biggest companies on earth.
In this exclusive interview with Real Leaders, Robbins unpacks insights from her new book and its wildly popular, research-backed The Let Them Theory. Plus, she gives a crash course on ChatGPT for business, explains why you need to get on TikTok Shop now, and gets real about her gravest mistakes as CEO.
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Real Leaders: How do the ideas in The Let Them Theory apply to business founders and CEOs?
Mel Robbins: The Let Them Theory is a simple mindset tool that shows you in any moment in your business and your life what’s in your control and what’s not — and lets you take the power back and lead. It is particularly important in business because when you get yourself obsessed with the things about your business or your team that you can’t control, it’s going to stress you out. The more you’re stressed, the more you bring that tight, micromanaging, narrow-focused energy to your team and business, the worse your team is going to do, and the worse your business is going to do.
Let them is a recognition that this issue that’s bothering me is not where my power is. Therefore I’m going to recognize that and say, “Let them.” The thing that your team did, the nasty review that the customer left online, the deal that you didn’t win, the interest rates that you can’t control — already happened. The power is not in getting upset about what’s going on in the markets or about how hard it is to hire talented people. Your power is in your response, and that’s the second part of the theory.
After you say, “Let them,” you’re going to say, “Let me — let me remind myself at all times that I have three things I can control: what I think about this, what I do, and what I don’t do.” One of the major mistakes that I’ve made as a CEO is I often feel the need to do something and react out of panic, fear, or anger. All that does — because leaders bring the weather — is it spreads more panic, fear, and anger through your organization and team.
The third thing you can control — and this is where it changes you as a leader and trickles down into your organization — is the let me part. It’s also about let me manage my response to my feelings about this thing. Let me show up as a CEO instead of showing up like an 8-year-old inside a big body who’s constantly reacting to things and sending shock waves through an organization that needs something different from me.
Listen to the full interview with Mel Robbins only on the Real Leaders Podcast.
RL: What inspired you to create a bonus chapter on leadership?
Robbins: There are two big topics that require and deserve more attention and detail: One of them is parenting, and the other is how to use The Let Them Theory at work. As a CEO I can’t just let my team do whatever the hell they want. I can’t just let things play out. I have to lead. So I wanted to lean more into those two specific applications of The Let Them Theory.
“Leading With Let Them” is a guide to remind you what you know to be true and give you some principles to use The Let Them Theory to be more effective. It’s about using the science of influence instead of trying to manage top-down. It’s about activating the motivation, skills, and interest of people who work for you to rise up. You’re doing it through people rather than feeling like you have to be the one directing everything. It’s a very different management approach.
Let’s talk about operations. Operations are people. A company is nothing without its people. I know everybody is extraordinarily nervous and excited about AI, but people are also concerned about AI and how we’re going to use it. At the end of the day, it’s still all about the people. Are the people who work for you excited to work for you? There’s a simple way you can tell. Ask yourself when you pull into work in the morning, do you think the people who work for you are excited to walk into the building? Are they excited when your name shows up on an email? Do you think people are generally open to what you have to say, or they roll their eyes at you because you’re a nightmare?
The Let Them Theory forces you to understand that you will get better results when you empower and influence people, not when you micromanage them. One of the hardest aspects of using The Let Them Theory, at least for me, is making sure I’m the one: Let me be focused on outcomes, and let me be clear about my expectations and what it means to deliver these outcomes for success. Nine times out of 10 if something is not going well in a business, if you use The Let Them Theory and let them know what the outcomes are, let them know what success looks like, let them have the resources they need to get what you have asked done, and then let me get out of the way and focus on how to nudge people along and lift them up inside a very clear container — that’s the winning formula.
The biggest mistake I’ve made is not being clear in my communication. If there’s a breakdown, it’s almost always about a lack of process, clarity, or skill set in a particular seat. It’s almost never about somebody’s desire to succeed.
If you take time to make this shift and you’re willing to go, “It’s on me. Let me lead the way, define the way, and then get out of the way and go into a supporting role,” it’s pretty incredible how things change.
RL: Where have you landed on leadership for yourself?
Robbins: It would be way easier if I were just the CEO. It is very challenging to be the person creating the content and the face of the brand and the company behind the microphone and in front of the camera — and do a good job as CEO.
I think about my business like we’re on a bus, and I’m driving the bus, and we’re going in a certain direction, and I’m the person as the CEO and the face of the business who defines the direction we head in, but I have to understand what seat in the bus I’m actually sitting in because I shouldn’t be driving it — that’s the COO. I should look at the GPS because I’m defining strategy. One of the most important things about leadership is understanding what is the best seat on the bus for you to sit in. (Jim Collins’ book Good to Great lays out the metaphor about having the right people in the right seats on the bus, aka the correct employees in the correct roles.)
As a leader, I have to recognize the things I do well, and if I’m not the best person to do some other job in this company, I need to get out of that seat and get somebody in it who can.
A major, major breakthrough for me was to understand that being a great leader requires self-awareness. The first step of self-awareness is that you manage your emotions and you are not bringing rain clouds and storms and dysregulation to your team because you’re stressed and fearful. The second step is self-awareness of your unique genius. It takes founders too long to replace themselves. The reason why is you don’t actually think about what is your unique genius — that only you can do in this company — and that’s the seat you should be in. Once you define the vision, what the outcomes should be, and what success looks like — and you have an organization where everybody knows the one thing that matters most today for their seat — things run very smoothly. The hardest person to get out of the way when it comes to an organization is yourself.
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