Leading Teams: It’s More about Being than Doing.

In the final installment of this 3-part series "Master These Three Things to Be a Successful Leader," we tackle the leadership paradox that stops most executives cold: You got here by DOING, but your next chapter is about BEING.  It is your being that is the key to leading others well.

Discover the three vital levers that transform a group of individuals into an unstoppable team - and why your 11-year-old should understand your mission statement.

A few things we unpack in this Bonus - solo episode: 

• Clarity: Because ambiguity and alignment cannot co-exist (and confused people always underperform)

• It's you or the system (rarely the people): Your broken system is producing broken results - it's the system 9 times out of 10, not your people

• Be Unsexy: The least sexy but most effective CEO move: institutionalizing weekly excellence cadences

This and more - don't listen without a notebook nearby!

The following is an AI generated transcript – expect errors!

@0:09 - Kirsten Yurich (kirstenklyurich@gmail.com)

Well, back again, Executive Hustle listeners, to the series of mastering these three simple things to becoming a successful leader.

And I say that a little tongue in cheek because none of this is simple, but we do have to practice these three areas if we want to succeed as a leader.

So this is your third installment of our three-part series and your shortcut to 20 years of leadership success. Ha ha ha.

And failure, of course. So in today's session, we are going to get to leading others. But before we got to today, what did we cover in the other two?

So a little recap. In our first session, we talked about the hardest employee you're ever, ever going to manage.

And go ahead and pick up your mirror. If you have one near you, look in it because that hardest employee was yourself.

And that's what we explored in the first. You can check this episode out in Season 1, Episode 16, and we really dove into the challenges of leading yourself, right?

And those get more and more complicated and difficult the higher you go in an organization. So we start to question ourselves in terms of what is the most valuable contribution to the organization I make and what is distracting me right now from what is the most important thing I can and should be doing.

We dove into, I would say, three of the things that are priorities when we're leading ourselves. We talked about self-awareness, reflecting on our behavior, our results, our impression, our impact on each other in our companies.

We talked about prioritizing that urgent over, or excuse me, prioritizing the important. We focused and talked about all-in accountability, not picking and choosing what we want to be accountable for, but at that highest level, we are managing ourselves, really taking the lens that we're accountable for all of it.

And last but not least, letting go of being the expert, showing up with curiosity. So that's just a little highlight.

You want more of that? Dive into Leading Yourself as the Hardest Employee, Episode 16 in Season 1. All right, so Session 2, what did we dive into there?

We talked about leading or managing the results and systems, the getting the stuff done in your organization. Newsflash, we are not worth much as a leader if we don't hit those numbers, right?

If we don't actually So, are we having clear KPIs? Do we have measurable targets that we are communicating out?

Are we designing simple systems versus complex systems? And yes, again, that all-in accountability showed up. The bottom line, if your system or process is producing something that you're frustrated by, nine times out of ten, it is going to be the system, it's not going to be the employee.

And we have to look inward first. More on that, episode two. Season two, episode three. Dive in there for more.

All right, so today, let's bring this all home, close it out, and talk about leading others. A company is more than just one person.

And as soon as you introduce that other person, that web of complexity starts to multiply. No leader does it all.

So we even though myself at the top of the list, would like to think that we do, right? I get it.

We all pride ourselves on doing more, doing the best, doing, doing, doing. That's what we are good at. We hustle, right?

And that's how we got to the positions that we enjoy today. But there is this doing paradox where we are reinforced for doing, promoted for doing, highlighted and awarded for doing.

And yet the next chapter of your leadership journey is not going to be about doing. It's going to be about being.

How are you being when you are showing up and doing these certain things with your teams? It is going to be more about who you are and how you be when you show up.

And it's boldly creating and crafting the condition. In your organizations, where other people can be, so that they can do their best work.

Leading others is going to hinge on what I'll describe as three vital levers. We love the power of three, right?

So creating clarity, number one. Number two, establishing and maintaining a cadence. Probably the most boring part. And number three, shaping and being an architect of your environment, the context in which people work.

So let's explore each of these. We're going to unpack them. Creating clarity. This is what you do for your team.

You are a, a, um, clarity creator at all times. It is the antidote for confusion, for reactivity, and for friction.

A lesson I learned really, really well is that people need to understand not just what is expected, but why.

And how will that success be measured? We can not give clarity on We and have alignment at the same time.

We can't have ambiguity and alignment. They don't co-exist. The best leaders that I have followed and led did a few things really consistently well.

They described the mission or the goal in crisp and clear terms. So much so that my 11 year old would understand, right?

If people are confused, they will underperform. And if they're confused, it's most likely the leader, . Thank It is not the employee's problem.

Clarity is your responsibility. They gave a compelling why. And if you don't know where this comes from, right, the start with the why movement, then I encourage you to read Simon Sinek's book, right?

People get, this is PG-13, right? People get pissed off when things change. The only thing that likes change in this world is a wet baby.

I learned that the hard way. have four kids. However, the antidote to this is they must understand the why, because the why never changes.

And so when employees understand the why of an organization, and you're clear and consistent and unwavering in that, then when you do have to change something about the how or the what that you do, they are way more in line with understanding and to Thank Thank you.

Ready to row in that direction with you. Next, these leaders that I followed and led that did this clarity thing so well, is they also described what done looked like.

When is this done? When have we won? What does success look like? What does good look like? You can use any one of those terms that you like, but essentially, you must define the game, how you keep score, and what does the end of the game look like.

Another PG-13 warning. The quickest way to become an a-hole is to hold someone accountable for an expectation that was not agreed to or even communicated.

We have to tell our players the rules of the game. As one of my colleagues said recently, don't dress me up.

As a football player, and then drop me off in the middle of a baseball field. We have to be clear.

Clear is kind, Brene Brown says, and so creating clarity is rule number one when we are leading teams. Rule number two, probably the most boring one, establish and maintain a cadence.

Leadership is as much about rhythm as it is about vision. I said this recently on LinkedIn, I think, consistency beats intensity every day of week and twice on Sunday.

The most effective and least thing I did as a CEO was to institutionalize the cadence for the executive team.

A weekly meeting, we had the same people show up, we had the same agenda, we had the same expectations.

The problems we dealt with and the solutions we generated, all of those changed. But the cadence! He didn't. And the week in and week out of showing up, even when there wasn't an emergency, was the most important and long-lasting thing that I put in place.

Up until that point, we had let intensity, the excitement of new initiatives, or the frantic of some recent crises, seep into how we actually did our work.

And it led to burnout. It led to decreases in quality, something that was a hallmark of this company. So we have this opportunity as leaders to set up cadences to create those conditions for behavioral patterns for our employees and for our teams, right?

One of the things we can do in those meetings, and I often did this, was, what did we learn last week that helps us do better moving forward?

What does this do? Well, this does... So things in my mind. Number one, it tells us that we are a learning organization.

We're not going to get everything right, right? And so we're going to normalize failure, okay? And then two, we're going to expect that we learn from it.

So it's not okay that we didn't get it right, but it is okay that we didn't get it right if we learn, right?

So there's a nuance to that. The other really important piece, which I think will tie into our number three here, is that effective cadences, this consistency over intensity element to leading others, is that it keeps your teams together.

It keeps small misunderstandings from growing. In my company, we called it keeping short accounts, right? When passionate people are doing difficult work, lines are going to get crossed.

That's how we recover from those issues. That's issues. Infractions that matter. So when we know we're going to go in that same room, week in and week out with that person, we have the opportunity to address issues quickly, and it becomes safer to do that.

And that predictable cadence helps us with that. We also love predictability. Humans really like rituals and predictability and sameness.

We all love a little surprise here and there, but there is a sense of contentment and safety when things are predictable.

And so whether you have a crisis or whether you have just standard operating procedures going on, keeping this cadence is keeping the team together and building those rituals no matter what for connection, for accountability, for an opportunity, for clarity.

And Sometimes, when things are easy, they're the first thing that we let go, and I'm going to just really suggest leaders that this is one of those places that's boring, boring, boring, but this is where you hold fast.

One of my favorite people to listen to is Horst Schultz from Ritz Carlton, and he talks about you need a process for excellence.

This type of cadence you set forth with your teams is that process for excellence. Okay, last. What is the third thing leaders do to lead others?

Well, they love them. Period. Stop. Even the clearest strategy and best product is going to fail in a company with a toxic and bad culture.

All leaders are responsible for their teams and the people that they lead. It is a sacred responsibility. And I believe, and I know I'm not the first person to say this, and I hope I'm not.

But I believe that you must love those that you lead, because when you stand in that place and lead from that place with that lens on, you're intrinsically motivated to erect an environment that already fosters psychological safety without needing to go to a class about it, that motivates without fear, that creates a shared sense of belonging.

And those combinations set up the opportunity for a want to and get to type of accountability versus a have to or you better to type of accountability.

And this all starts on the bedrock of relationships. Everything is built on the platform of a relationship inside of a team and inside of a company.

A company is just a bunch of teams, right, working together. And how do you build that? Well, from... The lens of love, right?

It starts with empathy and listening. As leaders, and I was, boy, was I one of them. We talked too much.

had too many opinions, and we stood in that comfort space of being the expert way too much. If we love our employees, if we love those that we lead, we want them to be the star.

We want them to show up and show us what they've got, right? We're going to lead from a place of empathy and listening, and I'm going to listen more than I speak.

The result of those two things is trust. So there's a lot of talk out there about, here's how you build trust, here's how you build trust.

Trust is an outcome. We don't, trust is not the activity. Trust is the outcome of all of the other activities that we put into play with our team.

Something that didn't come naturally for me, and I had to program. ... It was getting to know the team personally, what drives them, what motivates them, you know, and one of the strategies I use, honestly, super simple, but whether it was monthly, every other month, every quarter, I would take team members out to lunch, right?

Lower the, turn off those amygdala's, lower the stakes of the situation, go out, have food, right? Share some time together.

But I did have three questions that I always asked in some way, right? It was not an interview. I was not taking, you know, specific notes.

They didn't feel on the spot, but for me, for it to be a good one, right? Go back and answer that question.

I had to walk away with the answers to three questions. Why do you work for me? Not necessarily the company, but me, because again, it's about relationships.

What would make you leave? Again, I'm the contextualist. architect of this environment. I need to know the conditions that make people their best and the ones that would make them leave.

If I don't ask, how do I know? And my third question was, what can I do to make your job more fulfilling?

And sometimes that was, you can get out of my way, right? When I was a little too involved, potentially, right?

Some people maybe can relate to that. So those are the three questions. Why do you work for me? What would make you leave?

And what can I do to make your job more fulfilling? Because when people show up motivated, enjoying who they work with and feeling fulfilled for some portion of their day, you've got engaged and loyal people, right?

And that's going to start from a relationship and from a lens of love. That's it. Simple, right? Create clarity.

clarity. Set that cadence. And build relationships and love your employees. I don't know how much more simple to make it, but these are the things that we must, must, must do to lead others.

These are human beings in our companies. And when we see them from a human perspective, they are not line items or liabilities or cost centers, they're individual humans.

They deserve clarity about what's most important to the company, to their job, to their division. They deserve an opportunity to come together and talk about what's happening, what's in their way, how do we solve problems, right?

A cadence around the process of excellence, and an environment that treats them as individuals, and makes safe and motivating places where they can do their best.

When you put these ingredients together. So imagine what that could look like for your teams, for every leader in your company running a team, for you and your current team.

I hope this is an encouraging message. These are three focuses for leading others. We have two other sessions where you can think about how to lead yourself and how to lead those all-important KPIs and numbers.

Wrapping all three of those things together and you've got your recipe for effective leadership. It's been my pleasure to try to share some of these things.

It's a different format than having someone to interview. Hopefully you're not too tired of my voice at this point.

I'll have this three-part series broken down and the three elements of leading others. There's in the show notes if you want to go back and reference any of that to help you work on the teams that you're on and move them from stuck to unstoppable.

Until next time, listeners, be great. Bye now.