131 – The Power of Masterminds: Building Psychological Safety, Connection, and Growth with Jay Fairbrother

Look at your diary for this week and go through it one meeting at a time. In almost every one of them there is somebody who signs off your bonus or somebody whose bonus you sign off, and everyone in the room is quietly adjusting what they say to account for that person. You call it a busy week of leadership, although very little of it involves anybody saying what they actually think.

Your senior people are not short of meetings. What they are short of is a single room in which nobody with power over their career is listening.

Ninety-Five Percent Of Your Meetings Come With A Hierarchy Attached

My guest on this week’s episode of Impactful Teamwork is Jay Fairbrother, known as The Mastermind Guy, who has spent around 30 years building and running peer groups and has sat in thousands of their meetings. He estimates that in 95% of the meetings you attend, either your superior or your subordinate is in the room, and that single fact changes how everybody behaves.

People will not ask the question that might make them look naive, and they will not admit they are stuck, because somebody above them is forming a judgement and somebody below them is watching for weakness. I recognised this immediately from my own corporate career, because I had nobody to share anything with. It was my boss or it was my team, and there was very little in between.

Most Of What Gets Called A Mastermind Is Something Else Entirely

Jay takes the idea back to its origin. Napoleon Hill coined the term in Think and Grow Rich roughly 90 years ago, and his concept was simple: put two minds in a room and a third, invisible force appears that neither of them could have produced alone. Most groups now sold under that name are networking clubs or group coaching with a guru at the front of the room, which means the collective wisdom never surfaces because everybody is waiting to be taught.

Jay knows the real version works because he lived it. He grew his first company to a million dollars in revenue and then stalled there, despite hiring coaches and consultants and reading every business book he could find. Twenty-five years ago he joined his first mastermind, and he went on to grow that business to $10 million in annual revenue with a couple of hundred employees before selling it in 2004. What happened to him after the 2008 financial crisis, and the one group he refused to leave, is a story I would rather you heard from him.

Two Things Decide Whether The Room Works

Most organisations assume a hot seat and a few peers in a meeting room will do the job, and Jay names two factors that decide whether a group actually lasts for years.

The first is putting the right people in the room. That means enough commonality of level that nobody feels out of their depth or bored by the basics, and a proper vetting process, because a single bad fit can damage the whole group. The second is the container, meaning the confidentiality, trust and mutual respect that have to be built deliberately and then maintained as the group moves through Tuckman’s stages of forming and storming. His preferred size is eight to 14 people, because below eight a discussion can fall flat and above 14 not everybody gets a voice in every meeting.

The Superman Syndrome Is A Scaling Problem

When Jay looks back at the plateau in his first company, he names the cause as what he calls the Superman Syndrome, which is the leader who will not let go and believes they can do everything better than anybody else. Watching other entrepreneurs struggle with exactly the same pattern is what finally allowed him to start delegating and scaling.

I recognised myself in that. When I was building my business unit at Arthur Andersen I felt I had to do it all, and I remember being told that my real job was to make my own role redundant so that I could move on to more strategic work, which is a difficult instruction to hear when you have built the thing yourself.

A Lone Horse Never Truly Rests

Horses are herd animals, and they can only lie down and sleep deeply when another member of the herd is standing watch. A horse kept on its own stays on alert, because nobody else is holding attention for it, and over time that shows up in its health and its behaviour. Your senior leaders are no different. If they have no peers holding attention alongside them, they carry every risk alone, and tired leaders make narrower decisions than rested ones.

Three Things To Do This Quarter

Count how many meetings you attended last week without a superior or a subordinate present.
Bring together leaders at the same level from different sites or divisions, with nobody more senior in the room, and use an external facilitator who can protect the confidentiality of the group.
Notice whose contributions their peers take most seriously once the group settles, because Jay has watched underestimated people emerge as future leaders in exactly these rooms.

Listen To The Full Conversation

I closed the episode with a challenge, and it is one every leader in a scaling business should answer honestly. In a world where you need to keep adapting and changing, where in your business can your senior people say they are stuck without anybody above or below them hearing it?

Listen to Episode 131 of Impactful Teamwork for Jay’s full story, the eight to ten different types of mastermind he has seen work inside and outside corporations, and the fourth value of ours that he has decided he wants to borrow.

Then join us at our next executive forum, where we work through exactly this question with leaders of scaling businesses and pressure-test what human leadership needs to look like alongside the technology. Register your place here.

If you would rather start with your own team, take the Entrenched Leadership Dynamics Diagnostic and find out which patterns are already shaping decisions in your business.