I joined Derek Sloan on the Mental Stillness podcast to share my framework for Leading at Scale Without Direct Authority—the reality of my complex roles at Google.
The core of our conversation was simple: High performance and sustained success are driven through clarity, rhythm, and trust. I developed the Standard of Consistency, which I call the 3S Pyramid—Standards, Structure, and Sharpening—to solve this and operationalize excellence across global teams in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.
My experience, from growing up in East Germany and working my way through college in the US, to building an agency program from the ground up in the Philippines [12:31], taught me that true leadership starts with self-awareness.
We covered:
- Why Self-Awareness is the baseline for your personal Standards, and how a Google course helped me understand my own strengths and weaknesses early in my career [08:32].
- How to build a reliable Structure by creating a consistent rhythm of communication and using concrete operational checkpoints to maximize the impact of your time [15:50].
- My belief that consistent Sharpening requires a culture of feedback, and how I use the SBI (Situation, Behavior, Impact) method to make constructive criticism non-personal [19:15].
- The personal lessons of empathy and patience I learned through fatherhood, and why a true leader’s first lesson is realizing: "it's not about me" [31:39].
- How my personal experience with burnout taught me that changing the environment or structure is often the solution, not necessarily changing the company [27:57].
My final advice: Everything begins with clarity in your own standards, which is the foundation of consistency.
Life is lived,
Willy
