Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink

19 - Strategies for Getting Your Needs Met

• Leah Fink • Season 1 • Episode 19

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Have you ever struggled to voice your concerns up the ladder?  This week we zero in on the challenges of trying to create change when you have less power, and how to navigate that power differential with finesse.  Through approaching with empathy and intention, we impart some tried-and-true strategies for wielding your influence effectively and collaboratively. 

Are you tired of feeling powerless and trapped?

 If you want to be on your way to creating waves of positive change in your organization, this is the episode for you.

To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story

Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 5:00pm MST.  Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/

Speaker 1:

Every action you take as a leader has a ripple effect, starting with your team, going out to the organization and even out into people's personal lives. Here we offer you the chance to learn from real life stories of leadership so you can gain a deeper understanding and level up your own skills From communication to culture, to power and equity, to feedback, to resolving conflict and more. Join us and make sure you're creating the ripples you want. Welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink.

Speaker 2:

Hello and welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink. This week we're going to be switching tracks a little bit. We talk a lot on the show about the responsibility of leadership and how, as a leader, you can step up your own game and be more responsive and be more effective, and today we're going to be talking about it a little bit from the other side. When you are talking with your leader, what can you do to really communicate and get your needs met in the best way? So PV wrote in after one of our previous episodes. He said you talk a lot about how to behave as a leader and about the inherent power that has. I'm an entry level supervisor and I honestly feel like I have very little power in the company. Yes, I realize I influence my team, but compared to all the people above me, it feels like nothing at all. I really felt it when you talked about only having the four options to respond as leaders, because I feel like I'm always trapped in going along with whatever leadership says, whether I agree with it or not. You mentioned there were some other ways to get your voice heard by your leaders and I was wondering what those were. So thank you for that question, pv, and I'm so glad to hear that you've been enjoying the show, reflecting on and thinking about these things, and I'm just going to also again reiterate middle management is hard. The effort it takes to be responsive and responsible for people that you're leading and also dealing with everything that's coming from above you. That can be made so exponentially easier or harder from your leaders, and that's why we talk about the responsibility of leadership. It can make a huge, huge difference, and sometimes you can feel, yes, very trapped in this space where you're trying to both manage and be managed, and, of course, it can also feel like you have very little power compared to all the things that are coming down from above. With that in mind, let's start by talking about some of these ideas, and the first thing I want to mention is a reminder, and that is that when you have less power in a situation you are being led by someone, it doesn't mean you have no power.

Speaker 2:

When I hear people talk about things like feeling trapped and like they have no influence, often we can feel very powerless, and what's really helpful to remember is we always still have choices. We still have influence over our own lives, over the things around us influence on other people, even when we're not in leadership roles, of course, or when there are people leading us. And that trapped feeling, if we get stuck in that idea that we don't have that power, often means we don't fully embrace the abilities that we do have. We don't fully embrace the influence and the choice that we do have. Now I'm not saying that that choice might not come with consequences, because that can certainly happen, and you have to always be weighing those for your own life. Measuring this is actually a good choice, but we do always have power, we always have that kind of influence. And how should you use it? Of course, this is the question of the show.

Speaker 2:

Let's talk first. Let's do a reminder about what PV mentioned, those four options of what you can do when someone in power gives you a directive. So the first option is you might agree with it and you go along with what they say. Great, that's the easy one. You could disagree with what they say and not go along with it. You could agree with what they say and choose to not go along with it. We talked about this a couple of episodes back, about why you might do that. Or, finally, you might disagree with what they're saying but still go along with it. And from what PV said, it sounds like he feels kind of trapped in this fourth option, which he is certainly not alone in that.

Speaker 2:

We've talked about this that your way of responding whichever those four options feels more comfortable to you is going to be based on how you've learned to respond to those with more power than you throughout your whole life Parents, teachers, bosses, everyone. You've learned whatever strategy you feel works best for you. For most people, it is going to be that last strategy, because we don't like conflict. As a culture, as individuals, we don't tend to like conflict. There's vulnerability, of course, when there is that power dynamic and usually we don't have the skillfulness to address a differing opinion in a way that we think might actually do something. Everyone's complained about something, talked about how they wish something was different, but so often that change doesn't happen. Because it does. It takes some skill and it takes some knowledge and some different strategies to be able to use what you want and communicate in effective way that might actually create that change and, especially if you're talking to a leader in a business situation, there's specific things that you can say that will help you get your point across, create that understanding and create that relationship that means you can walk away with a win-win. So that is what today is about is how do you advocate, how do you communicate in that way?

Speaker 2:

The first thing I think we need to consider in a situation like that is what do leaders want? And I'm going to add a quick caveat as we start talking about this. In an ideal world, as you've heard on this show, everyone would be power conscious, conscious and aware of their own power. They would be taking steps to get regular feedback. They would be responsive and aware in their leadership. That is the perfect world. But the world is not perfect and, realistically, most leaders haven't been given the opportunity to develop these skills. They're not taught at all how to be responsive, how they track their impact and get feedback. And what happens with that and this is what happens to us all and has happened to us all is the burden of that heavy lifting of maintaining the relationship falls on the people with less power, people like PV when they're talking to their managers. So, like I said, this is not the ideal. We're always working towards a more ethical way where the leaders, the person with the most power, is the most responsible for this, but since that's not the reality, we, as people with less power, have to get our needs met, and so this is what the show today is about is we're taking that extra step or choosing that, and of course, this can feel like a really big step.

Speaker 2:

I know a lot of people often feel disconnected to the leaders above them and we're think about it, we're affected by their decisions. We don't have all the information that they have, and so they're making these choices that affect us and it might feel very different, very unknown. We don't understand what's happening, so that makes it hard to have empathy. Why would you feel like you care about this person when maybe they've had, even if unintentionally, a negative impact on your life, like the amount of times I have heard I'm sure my boss is a nice guy, but I've heard that statement many, many times in different ways, because people can recognize yes, my boss is human, but he's really negatively impacted me maybe. And it can be hard then to find this empathy and think well, what might my leader want? How might I create this healthy relationship? Because it's ideally not supposed to be our responsibility and it's hard to find that empathy, so we need to start thinking from this place of what is actually going to get our needs met and what's most effective. And we've talked before on the show about this balance of control and empathy and argue. This is another balance where, to me, empathy really wins. If we can keep this in mind, if we can think about how we truly want to support someone because we might want to be supported. That way, you actually get different results and I would say that those results are more of a win-win. Everyone gets their needs met. The results are much better. So we're going to keep that in mind and you can start by just thinking about yourself.

Speaker 2:

If you have someone coming to you with some feedback or they want you to do something, what might you appreciate in that situation? Would you like them to yell at you and accuse you and blame you in front of a bunch of people? No, I really doubt it. What if they asked you if it was a good time to talk or for a good time to talk? They didn't put you on the spot. They gave you some warning. They made sure to not give you feedback in front of others. You'd probably like that. Would you like to understand what's going well, before someone gives you some constructive feedback, it has her to guess that's probably true. Would you like someone to suggest a problem to you and also suggest a solution that they're willing to be a part of? Wouldn't that make you feel better? Wouldn't that make your life easier? Of course it would, so why wouldn't someone like that? So, if you think about what you would appreciate in a situation where someone has come to you and is giving you something to work on, or they're telling you about a problem, well, let's apply that to the leaders we work with as well. And so that's. I'm going to just honestly suggest some strategies that you can use. You can write these down. Think about how you might apply them in different situations. That's really what I'm going to use the time for.

Speaker 2:

Today is let's start thinking about this First of all, when you're communicating things that are helpful, use simplicity, consistency, persistency, keep it nice and simple, but keep at it and make sure you're giving a consistent message. Be clear, direct, calm, authentic. Think about the type of communication that will really create that type of connection. You can think about, maybe, when you might be triggered, what might be really hard for you to talk about, and what would you need to make sure you stay regulated when talking to this person and you might even think ahead of time or identify in that conversation if there are differences in leadership or communication that are going to cause some tension when you have this conversation or future conversations. And, of course, with all of this, you want to understand their perspective. So, even if you don't agree with it, even if it's something totally different, can you take the time and genuine care to ask about their perspective, why they see things that way, really try to understand it and be able to reflect back to them that you heard things when we talked about conflict. This is the best way to get past conflict is just to create this dual understanding of the problem. When someone feels heard, they're more likely to want to listen to you.

Speaker 2:

Of course, you also want to focus on things that you want in the future, instead of sticking to all the bad things that happened in the past. Instead of griping and complaining about things, you can talk about the curiosity of what might be possible in the future if things changed. You could be clear on your outcomes. You can talk about all these great things and then make sure you're not holding them too closely, that you're not too attached to a particular outcome, but that then you're willing to work together to get to there. Of course, you can also ask for feedback for yourself and you can respond to that, and part of that might also be figuring out with this what is working, what's not working in these interactions, what you might need to persist a bit more with and what might be smarter to let go. That can be based on the feedback that you're getting.

Speaker 2:

When you are looking at problems and solutions and different ways to do things, try to have the largest possible perspective on the situation. You may have less information than the people who are leading you and higher levels of management, but as much as you can get that broad perspective is going to help because it means you can evaluate the likely impact of these various alternative solutions. You can describe it and so you have a really good sense of how that movement forward might actually work. And then, of course, you can use different bargaining strategies, like, if you want a kitten, start by asking for a horse and then back it down, and maybe even throwing in some humor like that to make this a little bit more fun. And finally, if you are really worried about this. If this is feeling very much on the edge of safe or like I'm risking too much to do this, avoid taking this on alone. Join with some other people. Using that collective power from your peers will actually help get that message across. But, once again, while using these other pieces, don't form an angry mob and show up at your leader's door and be surprised why they wouldn't listen to you. Still use these strategies around communication, around how you present problems and solutions.

Speaker 2:

There is a much bigger list that this hopefully planted some seeds, gave some ideas about how you might speak to your leader to get your needs met, to advocate for something, to create some of this bigger change. Like I said, it's not an entire list, but it's a good start. And I want to start to close this by talking about one final thing, and that is I've shared some of these strategies with people before and I had someone tell me well, this is all just brown nosing, all right, this is just trying to curry favor with leadership and suck up to them, and I don't want to do that and I'm going to respectfully disagree with that. That could be your perspective, of course. To me, the difference is that if we're approaching this truly with empathy, with the idea of building connection, with the idea of building a win-win, because we genuinely want to move forward in a healthy relationship and we're willing to sit in this space that might be a little more awkward to talk about some of these things that might be a bit harder to address. That's moving away from brown nosing.

Speaker 2:

It's actually a genuine desire to get healthy outcomes, and I will say the other difference with this and this is why I really hope people will take some of this on is, to me, brown nosing or sucking up, whatever you want to call it is about avoiding conflict and just going along with what the leader sets. And my ideal outcome for all of you as you start to use these strategies, is that you can shift things and propose different ideas that might conflict a little bit with what your leader said or their opinion, or what they're hoping for. You might propose changes to something that they implemented, and when we do this in a really healthy way, it actually moves away from this false harmony where we're all pretending everything's good, going along with decisions that we don't agree with, and this is actually one of the best ways to say no, I have a different opinion. I have something new. I want to try, and I can present that in a way that's very respectful to both of us. So, pv, as always, I will be following up with you.

Speaker 2:

I want to thank you for such an interesting question, for a new perspective we got to play with today, and, if you would like to get your questions answered on the show, I would love to hear from you. You can find the link for that in the description below, and as part of that, of course, I'd like to follow up with a session to make sure that we've answered your question and to say thank you for contributing. And if you want to join us, live so you can comment and ask your questions. We would love to have you. The link for that is in the description below. I want to thank you so much for listening today and engaging. Even though we may be leaders, of course, there's other leaders and people that we're working with and learning from, and I really hope that this helped you think of some new ways that you might get your needs met in something that's super healthy and collaborative and supportive for everyone. Thank you so much and have a great week.

Speaker 1:

We hope you enjoyed the episode. Make sure to subscribe, comment and connect with Leah at meetleahca.