Be the Host, Not the Hero: What Barry Moline Taught Me About Leadership and Responsibility

I’ve spent a lot of my career being the guy in the middle of every project. If I left the room, the work slowed down. I used to think that made me a good team leader. Barry Moline thought the same thing about himself, until he wrote a book about teamwork and found out he had it backwards.

Barry was a CEO for 29 years, and he’s now president of BJM Solutions, where he speaks and trains on leadership, teamwork and influence. When I had him on Unscripted Small Business, he gave me a better model for leading a team, a single trait that sits under all of leadership, and a reason to hire differently. Here’s what I’m taking from it.

Watch the full episode on YouTube or listen on Castos.

The facilitator-hero is the wrong model for a team leader

Barry was sure teamwork was his strength. “I literally thought teamwork is my superpower.” He was the one who could facilitate any group, who’d tell the big talkers to hold off so the quiet note-taker could speak. Then he did the research for his 2019 book, Connect! How to Quickly Collaborate for Success in Business and Life, and found that the facilitator as hero is the wrong way to bring people together. His alternative:

“Better to be more like a host.”

A host introduces people and helps them get to know each other. Once they do, you give them a task and they handle it on their own. A hero-centered team works only while the hero is there. “When the hero leaves the room, the facilitator leaves the room, people are like, well, that’s what he wanted us to do.”

That one stung a little. If you run a small business or a small agency, you’ve probably watched it happen to you. You’re the hub, so every decision waits for you. Barry’s fix is to spend your energy up front on “helping people get to know each other faster” and let the work follow. His takeaway is the hopeful part: “No matter where people are, it’s easy to make great teams.” Alan Lazaros made a similar argument from the operations side when he taught me to stop being the bottleneck.

Get-along ability is something you can hire for

I told Barry about a museum trip with my wife. You sit on opposite sides of a Doric column and each draw it without seeing the other’s work. She turned her pencil sideways and drew the shadows. I drew the lines and the light. Same column, opposite approach, and together it was a complete picture. I’ve had more success collaborating with people who think differently from me than with people who think like me.

Barry took that straight to hiring. For most of his career, he hired the most skilled person for each role. What he found was that “the most skilled people were not always the best teammates.” One communications director, whom he calls “a lovely, lovely person,” was “a great team player if we were doing what she wanted.” When she left after about a year and a half, he changed the rule:

“We’re no longer hiring for skills, we’re hiring number one for get-along ability.”

They had to train more, but “our results were better,” and “We became a learning organization.” I’d pair this with what Rich Thomas told me about hiring your opposite. You want people who see the column differently than you do, and who can still get along with the rest of the team while they do it.

Responsibility means stepping forward, not doing it all yourself

When Barry built his leadership training for up-and-coming leaders, he says he found “probably about 50 different leadership skills” and “something like 53,000 leadership books” on Amazon. His read is that one trait runs through all of them: responsibility. “To be a leader, you have to step forward consistently and regularly.”

The next line is the one I needed to hear. “Take the reins. And that doesn’t mean do it yourself.” Stepping forward means bringing people together, setting the agenda and splitting up the work. “I’m okay delegating. It’s just somebody has to be that coordinator.” That’s the host again. You take responsibility for the room, not for every task in it.

I pushed Barry on the other side of the coin. Leadership is also owning the call when it doesn’t work, and there’s a lot of fragile ego out there in people running big companies who can’t bear to hear criticism. His answer tied accountability to a growth mindset, which he defines as “being open to the idea that you don’t know everything.” Barry recalls Steve Jobs telling his leadership team, “I don’t know what you do. That’s why I hired you.” The leader’s job is keeping “everybody’s rowing in the same direction,” then trusting each team to do its work.

AI makes the host model more important

I brought up Daniel Hebert of Oleno and a problem he’s working on. Everybody on a team now has their own AI setup, and each one builds its own layers of personalization. The way I use Claude isn’t the way anyone else on a team would use it, so sharing what works takes SOPs and a real plan.

Barry’s answer was a hosting move. He tells leaders to “get cross-departmental teams together, anybody who wants to, twice a month, and share how people are using AI.” Nobody is the expert. “No one has a full grasp of everything. It’s an elephant.” Because the sessions are peer to peer, “the stress level is lowered significantly and our minds are open to learning from each other.”

He also gave a concrete starting point for any owner: update each job description with the employee who does the job, paste it into your AI, and ask “what tasks can AI help with? And what tasks should remain human?” Jeremy Moser of uSERP, a digital PR agency, made a similar point in his Unscripted episode: interview your experts and feed AI their real answers instead of a cold prompt. Zeke Camusio’s version is to record every meeting, because that’s training data you already own.

What leadership and responsibility look like after this episode

When I asked Barry for the two sentences he wanted people to remember, he skipped responsibility because we’d already covered it. He picked persistence. “You’re gonna have a lot of speed bumps in your way.” The best leaders “are ones that recognize good ideas and then persist to get over the roadblocks and speed bumps and the no’s and the not today’s.”

So here’s my short list:

1. Be the host. Introduce people and get them talking before you hand out the work, so the team doesn’t stall when you leave.
2. Hire the teammate, train the skill. Ask references how a candidate handles not getting their way.
3. Step forward without grabbing everything. Responsibility is coordinating, not doing it all.
4. Learn AI in public. A twice-a-month show-and-tell beats everyone figuring it out alone.
5. Keep going past the no’s. In Barry’s words, “You have to persist in everything that you do. And when you do, that’s how you become successful.”

For the full episode recap, read Barry Moline on hiring for get-along ability on Unscripted Small Business, and for the marketing angle, the AI job description exercise for marketing teams on SEO Arcade. Barry gives away free one-to-two-page guides on building teams and influence at barrymoline.com/resources, writes on his blog, and is on LinkedIn.

Sponsor disclosure: uSERP, Oleno and ClearLead Digital are paid sponsors of the Unscripted podcast network. Links to them are marked as sponsored.