Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink

54 - Leading Leaders

• Leah Fink • Season 2 • Episode 4

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Ever wondered about the difference between managing a team and managing other leaders? Join us as we explore the importance of a staff-first perspective, as well as discussing the potential pitfall of losing empathy as you climb the leadership ladder. Dive into how you can ensure that the people you lead are aligned, and having a positive impact on their direct reports. 

Are you allocating your time to best support the leaders you manage?

If you want to ensure that you are fostering a culture of support and accountability, 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 12:00pm 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. Today, we are going to be talking about the difference in leading individual contributors versus leading other leaders. What should you change in your approach? Eb shares their story. I've recently been promoted to a management position and this is the first time I'll be managing managers versus frontline staff. I feel like I should probably be doing something different as I'm leading this new team, and I would love to hear your thoughts. First, thank you for sharing that, eb, and congratulations on your new position, and I just want to say well done that you are already considering these things. I really appreciate that you're already thinking about what can I do with my leadership that's going to serve this group of people better and taking action towards that.

Speaker 2:

First, I'm going to invite you to take a moment to reflect on your own experience. This is always a great starting point and a really great practice for leaders to start empathizing with their teams. What are some of the things, coming from the position that you just did that you really appreciated from your manager when you were a frontline leader? These are the building blocks that you're going to start to use as you develop more of your leadership, as you understand your leadership core values and a note to higher levels of leadership in any organization, you should be doing this as well with every level of your organization, as much as you can. Can you remember the experience of being a frontline staff, the challenges you had, the resources you wanted, what you wish was communicated to you as leaders? When we start to advance in the organization, more and more levels of leadership and the hierarchy, we start to focus on our own priorities and responsibilities and challenges, and of course we do. Of course we prioritize that over the responsibilities and roles of other people. That is important. However, sometimes we get so caught up in those pieces that we forget about all the staff experiences that we're influencing by being in our position. This is everything about the lived experience of the employee and, ultimately, too, about your customers, no matter who they are. This all trickles down from what you're prioritizing in your role.

Speaker 2:

Even if this is the case, that you maybe didn't start in this organization like EB did, you're coming into a leadership role in a new organization, I would say then it's even more important to take this time to really understand the staff experience at every level. Do you know what's happening for your frontline staff to your mid managers. What are the challenges that they're all facing that? Additionally, as we've talked about on this show before, there's a lot of studies that show how power affects the brain. Now, and one of the things that happens is, as you are in positions of power for longer times you're in these leadership positions for longer times you can actually start to lose your mirror neurons, and that basically means your empathy. It can be harder to empathize the higher up you go, and so it's really critical as well for leaders at all levels to constantly be practicing this empathy. Make sure you're keeping those mirror neurons, and one of the ways you can do it is to keep reflecting back on other people's experiences. So this is a critical step for all levels of leadership, and I hope you are considering this now that you know that.

Speaker 2:

The reason I've started with staff experience, this concept of what are our staff thinking is this is the heart of leadership. I truly believe that is leadership at forefront should be about serving the staff that are reporting to you, and it has to come before your deliverables, your outcomes, all of those pieces at. At its heart is who am I supporting? How can I be doing that better? And that is what really gets you those really great outcomes. So keeping that at the very heart of your leadership, no matter what position you're in, this is something I wish I had done more in.

Speaker 2:

One of my earlier leadership roles was when I came in. I wish I'd really committed all my time even going over time for a little while to really make sure that the staff were secure in a new program we were running, that I would have spent all my time mentoring them, making sure they were up to date and understood everything, because as things progressed and I hadn't committed as much time as I needed even though it was a huge amount I noticed that I was facing challenges that I could have avoided had I done that. So, hoping to save you a little bit of time there, that you really take this time to start with from the employee space. That being said, that's the base I wanted to start with, but let's talk about the difference, really, between leading individual contributors and other leaders. If you listen to past episodes of the show, we've talked about the responsibilities of different levels of leadership, of different people in the organization, what they should be focused on. So we talked about experts and mentors and system operators and visionaries and how, as you progress through different parts of the company, more time in your role should be committed to each of those different things. So when you started with the company, you're probably in that expert role where you really focus on those tasks.

Speaker 2:

As you moved up EB to your past leadership role, you were starting to move more into that mentorship space, maybe a bit of system operations, and now in your current role you should be mostly in that mentorship space very little expert, little bit of systems operations, maybe a tiny bit of visionary. But your main focus again is how are you mentoring these people? How are you now progressing? This leader to take on the next role? And the reason I want to highlight this as well as often when people step into these new roles, they get stuck a little bit on that past role. They get stuck a little bit on maybe the expert piece, the things that they were expert and they felt confident in, and now they're a little bit more unsure. So you want to stick to that previous piece and this is to suggest to you that what you really want to do is shift fully into this new position and really focus on mentorship. So you know that the leaders you're leading know how to lead, and the important part with this is how are we going to measure this? How do you know that they're going to be good leaders?

Speaker 2:

Well, the first thing you could do is you can ask them. You can ask them to self-assess their leadership skills. What are they confident in? What are they less sure on? Do they have any questions that need to be answered? That would provide them important clarity for their role, or even for the roles and responsibilities of their teams, because a lack of clarity in any of these pieces is often where we run into trouble, where it gets harder to have outcomes or deliverables or just even holding people accountable down the road. So we want to get them to self-assess and then we really have the ability to help them. We can step in and support those places where maybe they are feeling more unsure. Are there trainings? We could recommend even simple resources like books or podcasts they could listen to. Maybe there's another mentor in the organization that you could match them up with. Maybe there's just answers that you need to give them that provide that clarity that we talked about.

Speaker 2:

There's so many different ways that you can now become their advocate. You are now the person that's stepping in and saying, hey, I heard what you said, here's how I am going to help you as your leader. That'll make them feel really good. It'll increase their confidence All good things that you want to support. But that is also about self-assessment, and what we know is that we are very good at believing that we understand other people's experience way more than we do. So self-assessment is a good start, but what we really need to know is the impact that this leader, or these leaders, are having on their staff teams. So how are we going to get information from their direct reports to ensure that this leadership is aligning their intentions and their impact?

Speaker 2:

There are a lot of different ways that you could explore right. There's leadership 360s. You can create open-ended invites for feedback. You could talk to the staff team, and what I would recommend is actually that you start talking individually with some of their direct reports and start to get a sense of what's happening. What's their experience of this leadership? A caveat to this, as you go into this process, is you do really want to be aware of how big this power differential could be right. We've talked about again about power differential, how your brain responds physiologically differently and your amygdala activation fight, flight, freeze right that bit of fear response and now you are another level, even up, of leadership, coming to talk to them.

Speaker 2:

There can be a bit of vulnerability and hesitancy there. So approaching this very gently, probably making it a little bit more casual, and being very clear on your hopes for that conversation are good starting points. Right, you don't want to come in and just say, hey, I'm here, give me all the feedback about X leader. That's probably not going to work very well. But if you talk about some of the goals that you have and trying to promote leadership in a healthy way, about how you're trying to encourage culture development through leadership, and asking this person for some genuine feedback, assuring them about where that feedback is going to go, how it's going to be used, would all be very helpful. They want to make sure, with that vulnerability, that this is not going to be punitive for them, that it's not going to be punitive for their leader. They don't want to throw some under the bus. So, making sure you've started to cultivate this safe space, this culture.

Speaker 2:

This might take a couple times, a couple different meetings before you get there, but if you have gotten there now, you get to have these great conversations about these specific things that you want to check in on, and some of the things you can consider asking the staff about their perspective of the role could be things like do they understand their role and responsibility? Do they know about the directives that have come from you? Do they have a comprehensive understanding of that? How do they perceive company culture and how do they think they're part of that? And then, of course, beyond that, you can ask questions about their experience with leadership. What do they like about their leader? What do they think their leader might want to improve on? All of those questions can come into play in this nice and relaxed conversation where they know that that feedback is going to go to a good purpose. And, of course, there are more questions you can add.

Speaker 2:

And I just want to get this base concept that these levels of leadership can interact. You can interact with some of those direct reports and make sure you're getting a really well-rounded view, and this is going to take time. Let's say you're leading five leaders. You want to make sure you're connecting with more than one person for each of those leaders, so you're not getting a specific perspective, you want to get a couple perspectives. So that is going to take time. If you are prioritizing, let's say, 15 meetings, you're going to have those meetings multiple times. Of course that's going to take time, and I promise, though, that this is worth it.

Speaker 2:

You taking the time to really understand how your leaders are operating means that you're taking out any problems with clarity, with roles and responsibilities, with accountability, that people can do their jobs properly, that they're happier in their roles. You're not going to have to rehire these roles as much. There's so many benefits to this. So, hopefully, everyone listening to this regardless if you are a frontline leader, planning on moving up, maybe, or a CEO, regardless of where you are in your organization is that you're taking this time to reflect on the people, how you can prioritize the experience of staff, that the leaders who are leading them are doing a great job and that you know that from their perspective, because this is really creating this space where everyone is accountable, everyone is able to do their job, feel supported, and really that is what creates an amazing culture.

Speaker 2:

As a reminder to all our listeners, if you have a story you want to share with us or a question, we would love to have it. You can find the link for that in the description below and, as a thank you for that, I'll follow up, make sure your question's answered and to say thank you for contributing to our show, and I want to thank you so much for taking the time to learn with me, to listen, to reflect on these pieces of your own leadership, hopefully considering all the ways that you can continue to keep empathy as your leader, because this is so critically important. So thank you for listening and remember to ask yourself what kind of ripples am I going to create this week?

Speaker 1:

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