In this transformative episode, Steven Falk, Founder and CEO of SwitchbackOS, shares strategies to balance systems and relationships for leadership excellence. If you struggle with team dynamics or control, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– How to rewire your brain to overcome bad habits
– How to use metacognition to manage thoughts and lead effectively
– Why balancing systems and relationships creates world-class leadership
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the start, scale and succeed. Podcast, the only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey as a founder, today, we are going to dismantle one of the biggest false choices that CEOs feel like they need to make, and this choice lies at the heart of the question, what do we need to do to blank, solve our problems, hit our targets, achieve our goals. Do we need better systems or better people? If you found yourself caught between these two approaches, you are in luck, because the man who literally wrote the book on how to get out of this trap is here with us. Today with us, we have Steven Falk, the CEO and founder of Switchback Systems corporate, Corporation which specializes in leadership and team performance in high pressure environments, with over 20 years of experience in marriage and family therapy, he brings deep insight into human behavior, communication and resilience. His work centers on the concept of human agency, controlling thoughts and actions under pressure. Through his switchback foundation training, He equips leaders with tools to break bad habits, build accountability and enhance communication using engaging practical methods. Steven is also a keynote speaker, and He’s author of the switched on CEO supporting cultures of resilience and sustainable growth. He’s here with us today, Steven, I had a chance to read through your book, and I loved it. Just fascinating. You do this great job of combining the world of organizations and what’s happening on our internal world as well. And so I want to unpack that with you a little bit, but I want to but I want to start with a couple of basics, if you don’t mind. So right out of the gate here, what is a switched on CEO? What does that actually mean?
Steven Falk
Well, thanks, Scott, I would say switch on CEO someone that has it’s not a tricky word, but it’s called metacognition. That means the ability to think about your thoughts, period.
Scott Ritzheimer
I love it. I love it. And why is that that feels more rare than it should be? Let me put it that way. Why is it so unlikely for us to just kind of happen on this? Why is it something that we actually have to work at.
Steven Falk
Like yourself, you’ve probably done consulting as a coach, and you’ve had like senior leadership teams, and you’ve watched what we call snowball fights, and these are people in suits that have MBAs, and so that’s why it’s important, because a snowball fight is not very productive at the senior leadership team, And that actually sets the culture, and that filters down throughout the organization. It says, Hey, it’s okay to shoot off F bombs during if, for whatever reason, you get excited and you get that adrenaline shot and a little bit of cortisol, and your brain goes, I need to protect my ID above all else. And then up comes the snowball. And so metacognition solves that problem within senior leadership teams.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. We’re going to unpack that here in just a second. Now I want to lay a couple of more foundation pieces that I pulled out of your book that I thought were really helpful, and so the next one is switchback theory. So it’s a pivotal part of the book. It’s a core concept. How would you define switchback theory for those who haven’t had the opportunity to read the book yet?
Steven Falk
Yeah, so I’ll break it down real simple. We talk clearly that there’s basically two brains that are battling each other in every CEO, founder and executive team. So front brain, rational, cognitive, willing to be part of Team. Back brain, storing memories that have not been resolved or healed, and that is a the reactionary non team activation system, both of them in the past, had value for where they stored memories. However, at the in the middle of that customer service moment or senior management snowball fight the back brain now has won, and the goal of switchback is to help CEOs and leaders build a culture where you can have fun with this, where you realize that that we have this battle in every one of our minds between the front brain and the back. And the option is for us to first see that battle number, to understand it at a very sort of, even at a clunky level, and then to be able to start metacognition, start managing that. And so it is not uncommon for people that understand our theory to be halfway through a meeting. It’s 230 in the afternoon on it, let’s say a teams call, which is like worse than in person, of course, right? And for someone say, Hold on, I think we’re losing front brain sovereignty here. I just saw a snowball go flying across, across the screen. Let’s, let’s see if we can re anchor ourselves. And literally, people have a little laugh. They go, Yeah, it’s me. They’ll. Self confess, and for senior leadership team to be able to play with the ability to resetting their focus, that is everything that is a game change.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. So in the book, you lay out this Eisenhower matrix, if you will, the four quadrants. And so for those who are listening to this and watching. We don’t have a picture of it either, but just imagine four blocks, and on the left hand side is the vertical access, that’s rules, regulations and systems, if I remember correctly. And then we have the team and relationships across the bottom. So there’s four different quadrants. You can be high or low on either one, and it was just a really, really helpful tool for unpacking what this not only looks like individually, but what it looks like organizationally. So I’m wondering if we could take a look, walk us through these quadrants. Why are they important, and what is each one?
Steven Falk
Well, I’m just gonna, if you don’t mind, I’ll just poke at the founder, CEO. So just, I mean, I have a slight advantage because I’m a founder CEO, and my previous work was a family therapist, so theoretically, I should have been reasonably good at Team relationship. I mean, that’s that’s not the case for every family therapist. But anyways, so, but for most founder CEOs, they became successful as technicians. They really did, and they were good at their engineers and lawyers. They’re, they’re, they they’re professionals. And so they even all the way through like elementary school and high school. They got their status by sitting at the Smart kid table in the cafeteria. And so those smart kid table cafeteria CEOs. They when they get into a pinch, when they’re under pressure, they will typically lean on the vertical axis, which is the rules, regs and systems, and their brain will say, Holy cow, my team is dropping the ball. I need to squeeze this thing tighter. I need to control it. And we need to really, we need to tighten things up so they’ll become technical in their solutions. And so if you’ve ever seen a CEO lose their mind at a technical level, it’s pretty interesting. And then there’s the other group, which I absolutely love, which are the CEOs. Were the goofballs in school growing up, but they were gregarious. They they’re maybe call them like riverboat gamblers. They’re they’re having to roll the dice and drink the beer and make friends and shake hands. And so they’re very strong on the on the on the horizontal axis, which is like the team and relationships. So they also end up with 100 employees and and like giant pieces of machinery and HR departments they don’t understand. And when they get into a pinch, they’re like, we just need to drink more beer, like we we just need to start having fun, definitely, we just need to roll some dice. And so they get there, sort of the kick out of that. And so both of the both of those CEOs, they on a normal day, they do fine. So one of the one, the high vertical, we would call that a quantum one leader, high in rules, low in relationships. And that’s what that’s made me wired all along. And then the river boat gambler, they’re low on systems. They could care less about the rules. And they are high on their on relation team, and they are Barrel of Monkeys, fun to be with. Both. Both are a nightmare to work for. So the goal is, meta is neuroplasticity, which is set a new target. The target is, as a leader, I’m going to develop systems and abide by the rules and regs, and I’m going to develop the people skill side of it. Just in full confession, I was, I was a riverboat gambler as as, as a kid, growing up, I didn’t learn to read and write, and so I was one of those kids like food, let’s let’s make friends with everybody, and let’s make fun of the teacher. So my my danger is to make fun of accounting and HR and and because I wasn’t at that table in the cafeteria, I was in the table that’s like, Hey, you think you’re smart. Watch me get your girlfriend, right? I was, I was that guy. So whole, was it ever a journey for me to I mean, it was coaching for my wife, like, oh, by the way, Mary, well, that’s number one, number one hot tip, but we’ll get to that in a second. So I had to my journey as leader was to develop the skills, the study habits, and always to become an expert at the rules, regs and systems. And I think that’s a much easier journey than those that are technically based, where they love the things, and now they have to journey into now I gotta love people. But loving people is something you can learn. You can learn, like in our book, that we have that other model we call the three lane highway, where. Just like I try to break down how to become a warm or reasonable leader and very sort of engineer way, yes. So I think I know that people can take that journey. It’s just it’s, I would say the technical leader is more reluctant to become a warm leader. But at the end of the day, you want to be world class. World class is your organized, smart, trustworthy, and you’re also friendly and kind too?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love that, because you’re right. Like, for all kinds of reasons, we have a tendency to kind of pull in one direction or the other and to a hammer. You know, everything’s a nail. And there’s this, there’s this ability to, I think, overcompensate on their strengths, right for the technical leader, you know, every problem is at its root, a technical problem. And so we have this tendency to drive higher and higher and higher on the systems, rules, regs, control side of things and and so because of that dichotomy, many times it feels like they’re mutually exclusive, right? It feels like we can do one, we can do the other. If we’re going to do this, then we have to do less of that. And it feels like it’s a zero sum game. But even just the way that you guys have depicted it, moving up and to the right in quadrant two is, is a high level of both, how, how do we navigate? What is the right amount of each of those modes?
Steven Falk
I don’t know it’s, I don’t think it’s either it’s resetting the target period, okay, and so, like our title the book, the switch on leader. How to think like a world class leader. If you’re not in that right top quadrant, you know, break it to you hard. You’re not a world class leader. Yeah, you just aren’t. And because world class leaders, when they get their 360 feedback, says, I just appreciate their attention to detail and I appreciate their compassion. Wow. And you need to get both scores on both of those to be able to legitimately classify yourself as a world class leader. Now, you don’t have to achieve that goal or set that target up, but why wouldn’t you? Because, wait a second, it translates into your family, into your community. It’s it makes you a better grandparent, like, like, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t want that. There’s a lot less brain torment if you set that as your target to be organized and friendly.
Scott Ritzheimer
Hmm, so good. So there’s different paths of getting there, and you, in your book, you distinguish between achievement targets and transformational targets. I’m wondering, how did you discover those as being independent, not independent of each other, but different from each other? When did you realize there’s actually two different routes here?
Steven Falk
A good question. I think, I think it was back in my practice, so people would drive up my driveway because I had the advantage of having a long, long driveway in the country and in a rural sort of logging community. So when people went on the yellow pages back in the day, they go, Wow, a male counselor that that’s not set up in town I’m all in. So I got lots of industrial men coming to see me, and leaders and leaders, and so some of them come with, say, a brand new Raptor, all polished up. Or go, this dude needs to learn how to love people, because he loves his things already. He’s got that dialed in. Then you get the next the riverboat gambler that shows up in his 350 Super Duty. He hasn’t been washed in months, and he’s got two years of accounting on his dashboard, you know? Oh, forget the shoebox. It’s the dashboard. And if you look in, there’s a lot of McDonald’s, you know, that dude needs to get organized. So the organized journey is more of a transactional journey. Journey into loving people is more transformational. So one is head, one is heart, to put it very soon, yeah. And the art guys actually have a hard time going. You know, I made fun of those people that were like the nerds, and you’re saying I need to become nerdy. Go, yes, you do. The cool thing is not that transformational. It’s actually skill based. And then the guys that are nerded out already. I mean, to use that term, I love them all, but you know, like that, are that that have that everything’s dialed in at a things level, but they’re, they’re not making eye contact when they’re talking to people. That’s a transformational journey. That’s a journey of the heart.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, now, coming from your background as working with families and then coming into the business world, one of the things that that struck me in the book was how deep you went and how much the internal world is really running the show. Here, and so we could probably spend about four hours on this. But, you know, introduce to us some of these dynamics between fight and flight and aggressive and passive, and what’s what’s going on in this internal world that’s really driving us in one of these directions?
Steven Falk
Sure, so I’ll make it a case study so we, we work with a company, wonderful company, that that their CEO, founder was from Eastern Europe. And so, great guy, great guy, but, but if you think even at a country level, we have different Different countries have different biases towards what they value. So Eastern Europe values the, in this case, the like the German value is to be organized and to be technically an expert. And so fantastic job. He’s got there, but now he’s trying to get to, like in your stages of leadership. He’s trying to exit as the as the operational owner, and just be an owner and have operations going. So what is, what’s, what’s, where is he missing out in he’s missing out on that team relationship piece where you can feel like the business whisperer. He was shocked when we did our three day foundation training with him. I wasn’t there. My team was there. He was absolutely gobsmacked as to how deep we went with his team. Wow. He could not believe it. He could not believe it. And he read our book before. So he was like Dooley, duly warned. He knew who he’s getting into. He didn’t realize that that the motivations as to why, let’s say, him and his GM were having such a hard time had nothing to do with day to day operations, and everything to do with with their unconscious bias and belief systems that came from their childhoods, that came from trauma, that came from from their inability to trust others because of something that had happened in the past. Wow. So when they were able to start communicating at that level, it was like they they went from being having a one dimensional conversation with each other, what that was not going well, by the way, to a three dimensional conversation that opened up, not Pandora’s box or all the like, all like, it wasn’t like we opened up all the can of worms. We just opened up a tool for them to be able to take a step back and go. We see it now at a level that we’ve never seen before, and now it’s fixable. Yeah, we can now apply metacognition like the beginning of our conversation, thinking about your thoughts, and we can actually set a reasonable target of being front brain leaders. And we can actually set the target of being what we call quadrant two, which means organized and friendly. We can now have a reasonable we that is a reasonable target to shoot for, because we have this profound toolbox to understand why we’re doing the crazy. Yeah, and up until then, they didn’t have it. And the Wild Thing is, they didn’t have control over the crazy each one of them is like, I don’t want to do this. We I know when that CEO steps on the on the shop floor, my brain goes nuts. I don’t know why it goes nuts. It shouldn’t go nuts. I don’t want it to go nuts, but I get jealous, I get resentful, I get insecure, and then the CEO is like, I’m walking on eggshells. I don’t know what to do as a founder, like, I’m not even allowed in my own shop, like, what’s going on? So they have this powder keg of dynamics. They thought it was situationally reserved to the two of them in that moment. Had nothing to do with that. Wow, when they know, boom,
Scott Ritzheimer
It’s wild. And I love the way that you described it, because, especially when it comes to feelings, and you know that inner working that can be scary territory for for hard charging, let’s go take the next hill. You know, we don’t have time for that. And if we do what box is that going to open? So I love the positioning of that as, Hey, these are tools, right? We’re not opening a box of worms. We’re we’re implementing a new set of tools that allow us to take this to a much deeper level. That’s That’s very cool.
Steven Falk
Hey, just to give you, in our company, we on purpose, because we know who our clientele are. We’re like hard driving leaders. We never use the word feelings, sharing emotions, psychology, like whenever even even those words are all banned, we talk about memories, moving thoughts, reposition your target. And yes, by doing that, we actually create a pathway into some of that other stuff that’s pretty gooey. We have sort of an engineering, an engineering pathway to that journey, which I think is very much appreciated by the clientele we work with.
Scott Ritzheimer
From a book perspective too, like it didn’t feel soft at all, and it felt very practical. And even visually, you’ve got some of it behind you there. But even visually, just being. Able to see some of it right. Was was such a huge advantage and aha for me. So I highly recommend the book again, just visual after visual to help you understand what’s going on. One of the hardest things about dynamics like this, and folks who’ve listened to me for a while will know I talk about this a whole lot for founders, but so much of it is invisible, at least until you know where to look, right and so what I think you’ve done so well with the resources that you guys have available, not limited to the book, but was make some things that feel invisible much more visible. Is very cool. So Steven, there’s, there’s a question that I have for you that I ask all my guests. I’m very interested to see what you have to say. What would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Steven Falk
They’re gonna hate this but here it is. It’s a big word. I struggle spelling it, but it’s a bit it’s a good one. Neuroplasticity is real. You can change. You can rewire your brain. You literally can rewire your brain. And so why they hate that is, there’s no excuse for bad behavior, zero excuse, especially as a leader, it doesn’t look well. Nobody appreciates it. You think it’s okay because you’ve normalized it for yourself, but you can change. Neuroplasticity is a real thing. Of course, we get a bit more corrosive as we get older and then calcified brains. However, we have proof of the pudding with all the clients we work with within government and all the rest that senior leaders and the in the twilight days of their careers can make profound neurological rewiring change that gobsmacks their family and the people around them, and what a pathway to the future if you can actually change those habits you are not proud of?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love that. That is amazing. So Steven, where can folks reach out and find more about the work that you guys do at switchback? Where can they get a copy of the book?
Steven Falk
Sure. So we’re our company’s it’s called switchback, but paid to find us yesterday. Switchback OS, so that’s operating system. Switchbackos.com, you can find us there if you go to Amazon. That’s the easiest place to pick up our book, unless you go to our website. So at Amazon, it’s just The Switched on CEO. How to think like a world class leader, and our company is small enough that I will probably answer your email, so that’s a pretty so talk to assume before we grow, before I grow beyond the reach.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s fantastic, Steven, thank you for being on thank you for the work that you did and captured in this book. Such a tremendous resource for CEOs that want to take it to the next level, that do want to switch on and serve their team and their vision, well, I really appreciate it. Yeah, it was, yeah, an honor and privilege having you here today, and for those of you watching and listening, you know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this episode as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Steven Falk
Steven R. Falk is the CEO and Founder of Switchback Systems Corp, specializing in leadership and team performance in high-pressure environments. With over 20 years of experience in Marriage and Family Therapy, he brings deep insight into human behavior, communication, and resilience. His work centers on the concept of Human Agency—controlling thoughts and actions under pressure. Through his Switchback Foundation Training, he equips leaders with tools to break bad habits, build accountability, and enhance communication using engaging, practical methods. Steven is also a keynote speaker and author of The Switched-On CEO, supporting cultures of resilience and sustainable growth.
Want to learn more about Steven Falk’s work at SwitchbackOS? Check out his website at https://www.switchbackos.com and get a copy of his book, The Switched-On CEO on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Switched-CEO-Think-World-Class-Leader/dp/1775281302/ref=sr_1_1