The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Unlocking the Success Code: The 7-Step Process to Succeed in Life and Work by Steve McNicholas

Episode Date: December 6, 2025

Unlocking the Success Code: The 7-Step Process to Succeed in Life and Work by Steve McNicholasp> Stevemcnicholas.com https://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Success-Code-Process-Succeed/dp/1916167101 DISCOVER THE 7 KEY STEPS TO UNLOCKING THE CODE TO ACHIEVEMENT AND SUCCESS!For over a decade, Steve McNicholas has had a passion to truly understand and capture the “source code” of success. What are those essential elements or components that drive consistent achievement and fulfilment within individuals, teams and organisations? As he researched this question, he began to notice a recurring and consistent pattern emerging. The SUCCESS Code® is a set of 7 sequential steps which, when studied and applied, will help you understand how to achieve any goal you have set yourself, personally or professionally. By taking ownership, developing clarity of purpose and creating goal system frameworks, you will form the foundations of your future success. You’ll also find a variety of tools and techniques to help you overcome limiting beliefs and powerful practices to maintain your progress and success repeatedly.By applying the 7 steps of the SUCCESS Code, you will:- Understand the vital significance of “ownership” and learn to harness this positively- Discover how your purpose is the rocket fuel to propel you forwards consistently- Understand that SMART goals never work — it’s goal SYSTEMS that enable achievement- Learn how to overcome mental blocks that prevent success- Form powerful habits and routines to ensure momentum time and time again

You wanted the best... You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times.

Because you're about to go on a moment. Monster Education Roller Coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hey, folks, Voss here from the Chris Voss Show.com. That lays you know, with our latest things that makes official. Welcome to 16 years going on 17 years of the Chris Voss Show podcast. We've one of the oldest podcasts, still running, still performing, and putting out 40 new, 48 new shows a month. So make sure you're further to show at your family, friends, and relatives.

There's over 2,600 episodes. can take and binge and you can just you can just spend the rest of your life listen to the chris wash show podcast and and you'll learn so much that i don't know what you'll do with it you'll probably take over the world or something so anyway go to prefer your family friends go to goodreads.com for chestchrist chrisvost linkedin dot com for chest chrisvost facebook dot com for chest chrisvoss and all the other crazy places that we aren't on on on the internet opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Voss show. Some guests of the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it's not an

endorsement or review of any kind. Today, an amazing young man with us on the show. We're talking about his insights on leadership, his books, et cetera, et cetera. Steve Mick Nicholas joins us on the show. We're going to get into it with him and his insights and all the good stuff on the show there. He is a two-time author, keynote speaker and program facilitator of his leadership success engineering methods and frameworks. After three decades in leadership roles across several sectors and from leadership rookie to boardroom executive, he has some firm views and opinions on how leadership is developed and taught. He considers himself more of a leadership practitioner than a so-called guru. With his third book due out for release in early

2006, he's looking to help as many leaders as he can develop the operating system needed for self, team, and performance success. Welcome to the show, Steve. How are you? I'm delighted to be here, Chris. I'm very, very well. It's late in the evening here in the UK, but I feel wide awake with the chance to talk to the legend that is Chris Foss. Thank you. And coming across from the pond, as we like to say,

over here to Yankeeville in America. So welcome to the show, Steve. Give us dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? It's super simple. There's only one.com for me, and it's my name. so it's steve mac nicholas all one word chris dot com steve macnichlis dot com and everything that we're going to perhaps talk about this evening in terms of leadership books speaking and everything else

can all be accessed in terms of that website and two plugs for you on the books you've got one book that's entitled unlocking the success code the seven-step process to succeed in life and work and also the recipe for success and i think you code wrote that with Jack Canfield. People, I believe he's the soup guy, isn't he? He is, yeah, chicken soup for the soul. Chicken soup for the soul. He also wrote the book Success Principles as well, which I think is only sold

two or three hundred million copies between you and I. So yes, that was a super privilege to be invited to co-author with Jack. That was several years ago, actually. And that actually planted the seed for the second book, which is all my own work. And that's what you just referenced just then, the unlocking the success code. There's a bit of a theme here to the word success in both books. And actually, I reference it in the title in the third book that I'm working on at the moment. So clearly you can get a sense that I have a leaning towards helping people succeed.

You have the theme they're gone. I guess failure is out, just success is in. Absolutely. And I think it's the thing I'm most passionate about is not helping leaders or individuals be average or miss or, or fail. It's how do you succeed? How do you win in this life? And how do you win in the corporate life? People seem to find a way to fail on their own, so they need your help to find success. I've always been able to find failure on my own. I'm pretty good at that, evidently. So you have something on your website called Leadership Success Engineering and it's a trademarked.

Tell us what that system is, or at least give us an overview of it and how you can approach radical leadership. As you kindly sort of referenced in the introduction, Chris, I've sort of been trying this leadership thing for about three decades now, from the very first start of a rookie, you know, just a teenager, I think I was, through to the boardrooms of private equity and all the pressures that go with that, or venture capitalism. And actually, over those three decades, Chris, particularly towards the last several years, I found myself leaning more towards how does leadership success work? You know, I had my own views, and let's be really clear,

as many times as I succeeded over the 30 years, I also failed as well. So I have the bumps and the bruises and the scars, and that's why I much prefer the label of a practitioner than a guru. And I think we'd all agree there's no lack or shortage of so-called gurus across the internet on these subjects.

But anyway, and in the last couple of years, particularly, I've become more and more cognizant, more and more aware and actually I've formed a belief that sort of contradicts lots of leadership development training, I think, out there at the moment. And I think for a second that organizations typically fail because the strategy is wrong or that there's a lack of talent or that the market or the product isn't quite what it should be. They, of course, help. But I actually think I have a firm view that failure or struggle in organizations is often found when the leadership is in effect inconsistent, misaligned, and lots of other labels that you can put on it.

And I've become more and more sort of firm in the view, and that's what the third book's about, and that's what the accelerator program, and that's what the methodology that you've just kindly referenced for me, success engineering. I believe I don't train leadership. I believe I instill it or install it, almost like an operating system in that, you know,

if you have an Apple phone or an Android phone, They're all very personalized, lots of apps on them, but they all run off the same core operating system. And I'm trying to do that with leadership. I'm trying to say, if you install and sort of firm up and get very, very effective at six or seven core components, then success tends to follow. So I train, I sort of install leadership, as opposed to train it. And that's what the engineering methodology is all about, Chris. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, if you don't have good leadership, as you mentioned in your place, it affects people's jobs there and whether or not they stay. In fact, most people tend to leave jobs now with citing poor leadership as their number one reason. And it's a big deal. I mean, you invest in these people, you put in a lot of money to hire, you put a lot of money to train. And if people leave because there's poor leadership or just the vacuum,

leadership really, that costs the company and turnover and talent, quality, et cetera, et I mean, I've had bad leadership places I worked when I was young and when I'm out, I'm not putting up with this manager. And yet I like the place and was willing to work there, but the management made it, you know, just miserable. I actually have a view and, you know, it's something I tend to, I want to do a keynote speech or a seminar, sort of deliberately say this next statement, quite early on to sort of provoke the audience. But I actually think leadership enablement is the number one critical enabling any organization

for some of the reasons you've just alluded to. And many, many sort of organizations in corporate America, in corporate UK, in corporate, in corporate everywhere across the globe, there is this sort of belief that there is a silver bullet somewhere in the organization or somewhere in the ether that says, If we go and find that, then that's going to fix all our cultural problems or our performance problems or our leadership problems. But actually, I have a real strong view that everything, every metric, every target, every sort of reason why a person leaves an organisation, as you've just said, you can always track it back to the leadership. And if it's good, bad or somewhere in between, then that tends to play out in how the organisation is performing. But when I suggest that to boardrooms, and when I suggest that to executive teams, there's a natural resistance.

initially, that they don't believe that it's actually all about the leadership, and I have a very firm view that I think it is all about the leadership. It really does come down to the man, what I think some people can refer to as the man on the white horse. It comes down to leadership. The leadership sets the tone for the whole organization. The leader is an example of, you know, what methods and morals and ethics and what the company stands for, right? And all that's represented down through. I mean, if you change

leaders, you know, you can see that with presidents of countries, you can see that with corporate leaders. If you put in a leader that either fails the lead or as leading the company one way and behaving in a different way, you know, all the people in the company see that. And they go, that guy's full of shit. He claims, you know, he puts out these PR things that, oh, we're going to be this big moral ethical company and good, but, you know, we're laying off people next week for the, for this, that, or the other, because we just want richer packages, you know, people, people see all that. And, and so the person at the top, the person who leads, you know, this is the same for armies, you know, throughout history, generals throughout history, the

leadership matters. And I would say, I don't know, it's 90% of the game, really, in business. Because if you don't, if you have poor leadership, your company will perform poor and it will show on the bottom line eventually, maybe not initially, but eventually it will show. Massively, and there's so many signals, so many indicators in any organization or any business that there's a problem there. It could well be, you know, that execution of programs is stalling. It could be that targets and metrics are being missed.

It could be that there's silos in a single organizer, that the default is to blame or to avoid accountability, et cetera. All of these signs and signals exist day in and day out in many, many organizations. And all lead back to what you've just very succinctly summarized, Chris, is that for some reason, whether it's sort of a willingness or an unwillingness to recognize the issue, executive teams seem to think it's something else. And they seem to go down the rabbit holes thinking we will find that something else. And actually, I think the problem is staring them right in their face.

And often the problem could well be the executive leadership themselves. Yeah. Let's not open up that kind of worms. But so, yes, I think we're both violently agreeing that, you know, leadership and the success and the effectiveness of it in any organization is the primary driver of how that business is going to perform. Yeah. And we've seen exemplary leaders, Steve Jobs.

I mean, he kind of had a dark side, but we've seen how. he motivated people to buy his product and how to lead the Apple organization and do some crazy things. You know, I mean, they were putting so much stuff into the original iPhone that, I mean, it was like, there was a lot of stuff that put fax machines and voicemails and typing on the screen and emails and, you know, everything was in that thing. And it was a lot of work to make this tiny device do what so many of these very larger devices were doing at the time. and you know you see great leadership when it when it exemplifies itself i remember watching the CEO of t-mobile for a long time i forget his name was a couple of CEOs ago but you know he was a great cheerleader he was rah-rah going around the company he inspired people he had lots of energy and people fed on that that work for him and it just seemed like he was an

exciting guy to work for fun and he kind of exemplified that is we're going to do work but But, you know, this is fun what we're doing and, you know, we get to do this. And people catch on to that, you know, they either light a, you can either light a flame as a leader or you can not light a flame, I guess, and just people are just whatever. It's another job. They don't care. Exactly. And you lead by example, too. Every people learn from others by example and how they lead.

You know, people learn from their parents on how to be parents or have relationships based upon how their parents. lead or how their parents have a relationship. And whether you realize or not, you have influence there. I've had a lot of people in middle management say to me, you know, I'm not the CEO, so I can't really think about being a leader. I'm just an employee and I have a management title. I can't think about being a leader. I'm like, no, everyone can be a leader.

And that's how you stand out and show you can do leadership is by leading by example, whether you're a leader or not, people just go, you know, that guy's got leadership qualities. We should promote him. Absolutely. Yeah. When I engage organizations and they talk to me about the sort of the leadership program, Chris, the natural sort of question is, okay, what is it about this? What is this engineering of leadership that you talk about? And I have sort of seven sort of core themes that my research and some of the best leaders, not necessarily the famous leaders. And you just mentioned one or two. And we can all think of the names that whenever we get asked, oh, give great leaders. They tend to be in sporting or political leaders. or sort of those types of environments. What I was desperate to do when I did my own research on the books

is I went and spoke to, I don't know, about 120, 130 leaders across multiple sectors, multiple geographies, but they were leaders that you and I have never heard of. They were just good people in senior roles, performing, succeeding, and had a great reputation as being great leaders. So I went and spoke to them, and I started asking them, what is it that you do? Why do your teams run through brick walls for you?

Why do you sort of deliver year in, year out? What is it that you do? Now, they might have used different labels and different words, but in essence, Chris, they were all broadly describing the same thing. And it wasn't that they were saying that they are leaders. They were largely saying to me, all right, as I heard it, they practice leadership and they actually operate leadership. And that's where I got the engineering framework, etc.

but the main point I'm sort of got from it all and if there's anything that sort of people who have an interest in leadership or actually do leadership as part of their career and their job there was three anchor points as I call them or three sort of foundational themes wrapped around those seven sort of core principles

Chris and you were just you were just brilliantly sort of leading on to them there is that if you can self-lead if you can team lead and if you can performance lead, then magic happens. And in many organisations, leaders are very good at one, perhaps two of the three. But what I try to do with the engineering framework is help them achieve a baseline in all three. And then what you're actually creating there, you're producing or creating a leader

that's got great self-awareness and self-accountability, that's got a way of managing people and leading and inspiring through a team. but has also got that edge and that ability and that capacity to deliver the performance. And you put those three, the self, the team, and the performance aspects of leadership together. And that's where, you know, I use the expression, magic happens. But that's what those 120 odd leaders that I spoke to over several years. That's what they all do brilliantly well. You know, I find a lot of leaders when I talk to them, I'm like, what is your leadership style?

What is your toolbox? how would you say that you present yourself a leadership? And a lot of them really don't know. They'll say, I don't know. And I'm like, have you given some thought as to how you lead, how you come off as you lead? I mean, we've got some people on the show, they do

these CEO surveys where they have like an anonymous survey of all the employees and of course vice versa. And everyone gets to take in assess each other and find out how they're perceived. And, you know, I mean,

I can think I'm the greatest leader from a slice wonder bread, but if I'm perceived differently through how I'm communicating, how I'm leading, whether I'm being effective or not, people can have their own opinions of that. And sometimes I can think, you know, it's kind of like communication. You think you communicated to somebody, something, and maybe you weren't quite effective or detailed as you needed to be. And so whatever the key points of your communication got missed, now you have a problem because people don't understand, you know, what you told them do, instructing them do. And, you know,

having that self-awareness, I think, is really important. Do you find a lot of leaders are self-aware? Not anywhere near enough to sort of be what I would call competent and effective in that space. We all have blind spots. You know, we all have aspects of how we're talking about leadership, because that's obviously my main theme. But if we think about when we've been leaders. I've often thought, God, I'm very good at this because, you know, my guys seem to be responding to every communication. But I've since learned that they often used to think, Steve's not revealing all the truth. Steve's not being overly candid with us. Steve's being sort of not quite as transparent as we would expect. And yet I'm sat there as the leader,

sort of of a view of, I'm doing this really good. I've got the title. I've got the badge. So I must be good at these elements and actually self-awareness it's why it's the first of the three because i don't think you can truly effectively lead others until you actually have got a sense of competence and effectiveness at leading yourself it's now when's your ego speaking versus when is you know when is your heart and your soul speaking it's things like that chris so it's a long answer to a very simple question not nowhere near as many leaders as as we should and as i believe should have an awareness of themselves, let alone when they get onto how they lead their teams and their performance. No, it's a glaring gap. And those leaders that do put some investments and

effort in that can really be seen to make a massive difference. And being self-aware is really important. How am I coming across? Am I communicating effectively? You know, a lot of people get thrown into leadership. I don't know what your opinion is on this. So I'll see some thoughts. but it seems like a lot of people get thrown into leadership. Sometimes they're not qualifying to do what they do. Sometimes they're not trained. I remember when I got thrown into management. There was a lot of management training.

It was just like, yeah, here's your new title, have fun with that, and enjoy working all the time. And there's not a lot of leadership training or confident leadership training. I guess you can go through other than hiring people like yourself and books and training and seminars, I suppose.

But a lot of people don't go through that. And so they just kind of go, what they thought I had some leadership ability, so I'll just wing it. Yeah. Do you see that? I see it everywhere. And eventually chaos takes over. That's really down to the sort of individual leader themselves, because for the reason

you've just said, they've been put in a position without the support and the enablement and what I would call the operating system to have half a chance of succeeding. Usually we both know it. People get promoted into leadership because they were good at the day job. And then they were suddenly put. in charge of the people doing the day job with the belief that leadership should come quite naturally because they were

good at whatever that day job was. But actually what tends to happen is those individuals they get almost sheep dipped through a series of events through a series of workshops or conferences or whatever other labels we want to put on them, Chris. But

none of them actually true, it's almost like a theatre. They go to a workshop on culture. they sit and get preached to and then the organisation sit back and think we've now enabled our leaders to be sort of culturally more effective but actually culture and any topic

you only become good at it you only really grow at it when you actually get the chance to practice it when you get the chance to do it and actually that's one of the biggest glaring gaps of new leaders is if they're lucky they might go on a training program but I'm going to sort of call that out again Chris

You don't train leadership. You have to instill it, install it, allow it to grow, allow people to practice, allow people to learn. And from that, they'll make mistakes, but they'll become sort of operationally effective. And that's what I get very frustrated. Throughout my career, I must have gone to hundreds and hundreds of leadership training events. Did I think any of them made a difference to my effectiveness when I look back? No, not really. I gathered a lot of materials and I've got a lot of folders and a lot of books on my shelves.

I've got very good shelf esteem, but I probably haven't got particularly good self-esteem. That's my take on that. We need to do much, much more to help the new leaders coming into the role. Yeah, I mean, I started studying leadership when I was just coming out of high school. I knew I wanted to be a CEO of a major company someday, or at least one of my own, which I did multiple times. I knew I needed to prepare for it. And so I started reading, it was Harvard Business Review. I would get the courses from Harvard Business Review, and I get the magazine.

I think it was quarterly back then. I think it's still quarterly. But I would read and consume everything I couldn't leadership, but between Peter Drucker and all the other great authors that were out there. I studied to try and become a leader, to practice leadership, to become good. And I don't think a lot of people go through that process. That was my college, really, was I gave myself. my own kind of MBA, studying leadership, how to run companies, the aspects of companies I need

to run and everything else. And it prepared me to eventually be my own CEO and run my own companies. And I didn't do it perfectly or well. I did the best they could. And I'm constantly learning. To this day, I don't consider myself a great leader or good leader. I think I'm okay. But, you know, I'm constantly working.

You know, I try to keep myself grounded and remind myself that there's still lots of room to grow and you know sometimes you you don't perform in the best moments sometimes whether it's under stress or duress you're tired you know sometimes you can bark at somebody the wrong way and you're just like ah man i can get enough sleep and wasn't in the right place sometimes you still don't communicate effectively you communicate shorthand you know you know what you're talking about but no one else does but that's back to the self-awareness point you know you recognize when you did that and you knew instinctively something spoke to you of I was a bit crabby today or that email probably was written in the wrong tonality and I suspect Chris you know the

natural reaction is then to either apologize but to go and have a chat now that's what I mean by self-awareness that's that radar that's that six sense that too many leaders haven't even switched it on and it that's the recognition where you know the best leaders would know when they've made mistakes. We all make mistakes. In 30 years of leadership, goodness me. I got many, many things wrong. But I also do recall lots and lots of times of going to say,

sorry when I got it wrong. And I think that's why lots and lots of people stayed loyal to me and we went on and had some great successes. And I think it comes from that self-awareness point. And I think people see that self-awareness. They see when, you know, like I say, they see when a leader apologizes or when he goes, hey, we got this wrong.

You know, when you're trying to over, you covered over with BS and PR and stuff, people see the bullshit. And they go, yeah, you're full of shit. But, you know, people will trust and follow somebody that they believe can be a good judge. I think of it as being a good judge, being a character.

And if you're honest with them and say, hey, I know we fucked up, they go, okay, he knows he fucked up. We don't have to sit here and go, you fucked up he knows so and he's fixing it and making the steps to make it happen or he did fix it people like that let's talk about some of the offerings you have on your website notice there's some programs here some speaking stuff you do some downloadable materials and call books people can do tell us about some of those offerings people can take advantage of working with you oh that's very

kind chris yeah there's two main offerings in terms of how i try and help organizations you've alluded to both of them, but I'm going to take the opportunity to remind everybody that I do two main things in terms of leadership success engineering, Chris. If I get the chance to stand on a stage and talk to an audience, then I think there are several keynotes and several sort of provocative energizing and sort of interactive talks that I give to get this sort of thinking into the audience's mind. And that is something I've spoke all over the world. I've been very, very lucky to have been invited to stand on stages in Europe, in the US, and obviously the UK, sort of my homeland. And what typically then tends to happen, maybe that's on the quality

of the speech, is that people will then approach me afterwards and say, you know, what is it that you actually do for leadership in organisations? And that's the second part of the proposition or the offering of the business, Chris. That's when I have a very sort of long title leadership program called the Accelerator 100 and that effectively is the leadership engineering program but we deliver it over 100 days and one of the other reasons why I'm particularly proud and actually difference from almost 99% of leadership development that that I come across is I spend more time on implementation and execution than I do in the classroom. The classroom is very important. Don't give me wrong. It's important that delegates understand the theory and the frameworks and we get the

chance to discuss and dissect and reflect, but actually that's 40% of the program. The other 60% is when they go away and implement it and I sit there at moments in that 100 days and I sign off and I validate and I challenge and I hold them to account and that's when the real return on investment, that's when the real return growth actually occurs because sat in a classroom, talking theory, it's a start, but until they actually sit in front of their own teams and apply this sort of operating system or engineering framework, then they don't really grow. And it's a brilliant program. We've had numerous successes. Many, many, many organizations have seen real success. And I've actually come to me with underachieving,

underperforming teams. And I'm delighted to say, once the methodology has been implemented, they've seen a fantastic turnaround. So if I'm not in a classroom, then I tend to be on a stage, Chris, and if I'm not doing either of those, then I'm working on the third book. Ah, and do you have an anticipated date for the third book? Yes, the publishers are pushing me daily, but anyway, the first

manuscript was delivered about a month ago. So I hope it's on the bookshelves, on Amazon and in bookstores by March of 2026. So the clock is ticking, but that's the deadline that they've said. They're going to hold me to. You know, sometimes we do our best work, and we have

a gun to our head. Yeah, not that's hopefully metaphorically, but I agree, I agree. Anything more we want to promote or plug out to people or tell them how they can on board with you, reach out to you and get involved with you? Not particularly great. I think we said earlier on, I'll say it again, www. www.

steve macnicholas.com. That's my website where anything and everything that I sort of talk about and I can help organizations with leadership engineering. Anything is access there, the speaking site, multiple downsides. loads, brochures, et cetera, and PDF copies of the books are all available for people to go and access, and I wish them well if they wish to. That's good data and information, and people can also order up your books there so they can take advantage of your books, read more about what goes on with your stuff and all that

good stuff. Thank you very much for coming to show, Steve. We really appreciate it. My pleasure, Chris. It's been a delight and lovely to talk to you. Thank you. And thanks for tuning in. Check out Stephen in his website and his books.

Go to goodrease.com, fortunes, Chris Foss. LinkedIn.com, Fortunus, Christfoss. Facebook.com, Fortunus, Chris Foss, YouTube.com, Fortunus, and all this crazy place on the internet. Be good at each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time. You've been listening to the most amazing, intelligent podcast ever made

to improve your brain and your life. Warning. Consuming too much of the Chris Walsh Show podcast can lead to people thinking you're smarter, younger, and irresistible sexy. Consume in regularly moderated amounts. consult a doctor for any resulting brain bleed there we go there we go