Dr. Chris Fuzie, President of the National Leaderology Association and Founder of CMF Leadership Consulting, is on a mission to elevate leadership into a respected science—and to develop better leaders by grounding them in theory and behavior.

We dive into the emerging field of Leaderology and how Dr. Fuzie is working to verify and certify leadership practitioners as “Leaderologists.” He introduces the STICKUM Framework for building team cohesion through Sacrifice, Teamwork, Interaction, Communication, Keeping people focused, Unique norms and symbols, and Mission. Chris also explores the concept of Liminal Leadership—where leaders must seamlessly transition between leading and following—and explains how followership is as critical as leadership itself.

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Create Cohesion with Dr. Chris Fuzie

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast. And my guest today is Dr. Chris Fuzie, president of the National Leaderology Association, a non-profit organization that establishes and promotes leaderology, the study of leadership as a respected discipline in science. He is also the owner of CMF Leadership Consulting. So without further ado, welcome to the show, Chris.

Thank you, Steve. I’m very happy to be here. Yeah, I’m looking forward to this.

Well, I have to tell you that we are 300 episodes in and you’re the first leaderologist that we ever had on this podcast. So it’s kind of a big day for us.

Oh, good.

So, what is leaderology? I’ve never heard this before, but it sure sounds interesting.

Well, okay, so you have psychology, you have psychologists. You have biology, you have biologists. You have all of these other ologies, which is the scientific study of or the study of whatever the discipline is. So leaderology is nothing more than the scientific study of leadership. So as a leaderologist, there’s different levels within leaderology. And

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as a leaderologist, that means that you are formally educated in leadership theory and leadership practice.
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And the different levels, if you have one degree, two degrees, like I have three degrees, so three formal degrees in leadership. And so that’s what a leaderologist is. It’s just somebody who studies just like a biologist studies biology.

So, is this a trademark designation or anyone can call themselves a leaderologist who are expert in leadership?

Yeah, that’s the thing is that we actually verify that the person is a leaderologist. And so through the National Leaderology Association, what we do is in order to join, you have to submit your transcripts to show that you’ve actually studied leadership, not management, but leadership. I know you know the difference between management and leadership, but that’s why we look at the type of classes that people have taken, what is their dissertation on that kind of stuff. So we look at all that kind of stuff before we designate somebody. That’s why they’re called verified leaderologists, because they have been vetted, they have been verified as a leaderologist before we will say, yes, this person knows what they’re talking about.

Okay. That makes sense. So in terms of definition, my favorite definition is that you manage things and you lead people. What is your definition? What is the official designated definition of a leaderologist and the leader?

I say the same thing. Manage things, you lead people. But a leaderologist understands the theories behind the concepts of leading people. As an example, let’s use cohesion as an example. There’s different ways of building cohesion.

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I use the acronym STICKUM. Personal sacrifice, teamwork, getting people to interact. C is communication. K is keeping people focused on the mission. U is unique norms and symbols. And then the M is the mission focus.
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If you think about all those things, when you look at cohesion, then it’s important that you use all of those things. Plus cohesion, you have task cohesion and social cohesion, and task cohesion and social cohesion develop differently. You could have a lot of people who are doing their tasks, but don’t get along. That’s task cohesion. But then you could also have the situation where people all get along, but they don’t get anything done. That’s social cohesion. You want to balance those out. How do you balance those out? Well, you have to look at what’s happening with task cohesion and social cohesion. And then in the team dynamic, you look at what’s going on with teams because cohesion is a group structural dimension, but it’s also a group process. So if you don’t know that kind of stuff and you just try to build cohesion by doing a team building, well, you have to understand how that team building works. You have to understand the theory behind that team building. That’s an example of why a leaderologist, they understand those theories behind the acts, behind the behavior, I should say.

That’s great. So we talked about a framework before the show, but I would like to pivot and talk about the Cohesion Framework, because it’s very interesting, even more interesting than the other one. So what are the steps? What is the STICKUM process?

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It's STICKUM. You want to stick them together.
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So, some kind of personal sacrifice, not a sacrifice that the company or the organization makes for the employees. You, yourself, make a personal sacrifice for people. And that’s where a lot of people see the servant leadership coming out because that’s where the servant leader is making a sacrifice for people. That’s the S, that’s the sacrifice. The T is teamwork. Sometimes you have to force people into a team. People will not necessarily go into a team. It’s kind of interesting that there’s a show on TV called The Challenge where they took these two rivals and put them together as a team and they had to work together in order to win that however many thousands of dollars. Well, those teams at the end of that show, not only did they understand the other person they had to work with, but they really understood and they came to like the other person.

So sometimes you force people to work together. That’s where the social cohesion, maybe you don’t have the social cohesion and you’re creating the social cohesion along with the task cohesion. And then the I is interaction. Basically the same thing. You’re forcing interaction between different people and you’re making that interaction more personal. And it could be interaction between teams also, teams within a team. So let’s say an organization that has multiple functions, those teams may work in more of a silo kind of situation. Well, you don’t want to do that. You want to have them cross training. So you may have to force some of that interaction. The C is communication and communication is one of those that people think they know how to communicate, but we tend to overlook things like active listening. We tend to overlook body language.

We do a lot of email, management by email or leading by email, that doesn’t work. And so you have to actually communicate. Not just communicate, get the words across, but find the shared meaning within the words. So that’s one of the things that I focus on is that, what does it mean to be honest? Are you talking about being honest? Are you talking about being transparent? Can we totally be transparent? Sometimes the law says you cannot say certain things. Sometimes, like my experience in courtrooms, that the judge will not allow you to testify to because it might unduly prejudice the jury. And so the lawyers fight about who’s gonna talk about it. And then the judge makes a ruling in that, no, you can’t do that because, and so we get to the shared meaning and what is the definition of something? You asked the question at the beginning, the leaderologist. That’s that shared meaning kind of thing. So that’s where communication comes in.

Keeping people focused