Improve your most difficult employee - YOU!

How to improve your most difficult employee ⤵️


Uh oh... did you know it's YOU!?

Self-leadership as the most challenging of the three leadership domains.
➡️ leading self,
➡️ leading others, and
➡️ leading things.

Mastering self-leadership is essential before effectively leading teams or driving results, especially for C-suite leaders who no longer have someone dedicated to their development.

Leonardo da Vinci said, "One can have no smaller or greater mastery than the mastery of oneself."

This begs us to embrace a shift away from action-oriented leadership (constantly adding to your to-do list) to identity-oriented leadership.

Moving from a finite to an infinite leverage focuses leaders on multiplying their impact through presence and how they show up.

In this bonus episode of Executive Hustle I break down 4 essential competencies in the Self-Leadership Domain.


Which ones can be added to the list?
Which one are you practicing?

The following is an AI Generated transcript -  there will be errors.

 Welcome, Executive Hustle listeners, to a special bonus episode. I am bringing us back to some ideas brought forth on February 5th in a special bonus episode of Executive Hustle, where I talked about three domains of leadership, the three things you must map.

If you want to master leadership, which we never really do, right? We're always practicing leadership. I really like to talk about it in that way.

We never arrive. These are things we're just always practicing, but it can be helpful to categorize them, putting them into three domains.

I talked in February about those three being these. We are leading ourself. We are leading others, and we are leading things, the numbers, processes, the outcomes, the systems, the getting the stuff done.

Those are big three domains that all leaders must practice and refine and understand and develop the competencies within. Today, I want to dive into probably the hardest of the three.

Let's just get it out of the way, and it's leading yourself. In leadership, your most challenging employee is often the one staring back at you in the mirror.

Yep. I said it. Before you can lead teams, drive results, or shape your culture, you must first master the art of leading yourself.

For CEOs or C-suite leaders, business owners, this is not a theoretical exercise. It's a daily discipline, and it sets the tone for your entire organization.

When you reach that top level, you no longer have somebody above you whose sole role is developing you, right?

Giving you the feedback you need to improve. Your available feedback dwindles the higher you go. I love this quote by Leonardo da Vinci.

said, One can have no smaller or greater mastery than the mastery of oneself. You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself.

The height of your success is gauged by your self-mastery. The depth of your failure by your self-abandonment. deliver If The We

Those who cannot establish dominion over themselves will have no dominion over others. Beautiful. I like to shortcut it and say we cannot know another more than we already know ourselves.

The journey inward is going to be the longest, but it will be the most rewarding. Oftentimes, our default when we are faced with new challenges, new things that we must rise to the occasion, our default is, well, I'm just going to work harder.

I'm going to do more. I'm going to add to the list. And I'm here to say that this is a finite strategy.

You are going to run into a barrier. And the barrier is time. There's only so much time to get things done.

And you will burn out. I think we're seeing that in a lot. A lot of places with employees and the next leap is not going to be about how much you can get done in your leadership journey.

It's going to be about multiplying your impact by being more, being more, generating more from those around you by your mere presence.

And this I'll suggest is a shift from action-oriented leadership to identity-oriented. Leadership, and it's truly the essence of self-leadership.

And I want to dive into that today. There's a story of a CEO who prided herself on being the first one in flame.

humanity is afraid arecrative. Kirsten Yurich, team was burning out. Innovation was stalling. If you dug deeper, you'd find this CEO was in the trap of doing more.

Okay. Let's be honest. This is my story. I was doing more. Always doing more. I thought that doing more was the answer.

Until I was coached, I was given a different perspective. And I learned about the being more approach and identity focused leadership.

When I started thinking about intentions, when I started thinking about how am I showing up and what is the impact that is having on the people around me, I realized how I was holding people back.

It was a hard, hard lesson to learn. But as I learned it, I began to delegate. Okay. So I began to reflect on how my intent versus my impact in relationships was working or not working.

I set boundaries. I figured out what balance meant or integration, which is a, I think, a little bit better term to use.

And my team reached higher levels of performance than I ever thought was possible when I was, quote unquote, helping them all the time.

That was my story. And maybe there's some familiarity in there for some people listening today. There are some core competencies when it comes to leading yourself.

Each can be practiced, each can be improved, and each are a step on the journey to being leadership, identity-based leadership.

The first competency in self-leadership. Self-awareness is difficult. We never really see ourselves, right? When we look in the mirror, we only see a reflection.

That's not really seeing ourselves. We can only see ourselves through the reflection of others, what they can tell us.

And so if we're not asking, we're not getting told. We're not getting the feedback. We have to get the feedback from others.

I was coaching a leader who was so committed to their no-nonsense communication style. He thought that, you know, getting the work done, cutting through the BS, this is the way to go, right?

This is what people appreciated. Well, if you really asked people, which you didn't, until we talked about it. ...

... about And it actually wasn't appreciated. It was actually shutting down dialogue, relationships, and it was having the opposite effect that he thought it was having.

So he had to learn to pause. He had to learn to ask clarifying questions. He had to learn to invite counter views and appreciate the moments of creating relationship.

And it's through slowing down that we can actually speed up. Self-awareness, selecting opportunities for regular feedback, reflection. What are you doing with that information?

Are you writing it down? Are you tracking it? Are you seeing if it's getting better? Identify one blind spot a quarter and work on it.

Because if your people don't see you get better, you'll actually stop getting the feedback. And that's never what you want.

The second competency competency in Self-leadership is prioritization and delegation. Are you leading from urgent, or are you leading from important?

Too many leaders spend their days firefighting and not fire preventing. Their trademark is, I am getting things done, I'm getting through my list, check, check, check, check, check.

Don't we all just love those checkboxes? Sometimes I'll add things to my to-do list just so I can mark it off.

Who's with me? I can hear you nodding. I was working with a business owner and she was realizing she was spending so many hours on routine things, including monitoring and checking up on the to-dos of her direct reports.

So mundane, right? But she thought this was a coaching activity to improve her direct reports. We really had to focus on moving her to what is important and not urgent.

We use the Eisenhower focus on details in the alleine. to of If you're not familiar with that, you can put a link in the show notes.

Getting to that box too on the Eisenhower matrix. Locking think time on your calendar is another approach here that can be helpful.

If you have strategic activities or you have projects and those are not represented on your calendar, then you are only reacting to what is being thrown at you and you are not the CEO of your calendar or your time.

And delegating or eliminating low-value activities. I recently told a client, here's the mantra I want you to have. Don't assume the things that are on the list are yours to do.

Actually assume, start from the position that they are not mine. And eliminate the phrase, okay, I'll just do it, from your vocabulary.

Those are the worst words said ever by a senior leader. Third, self-leadership requires 100% accountability. This is owning your impact.

I call it all in accountability. Accountability is a zero or one sum game. is not, sometimes I'm accountable. Well, sometimes I'm truthful.

This is yes or no, guys. You are either absolutely accountable or you are absolutely not accountable. You don't blame circumstances and you don't take an approach for accountability, whereas these are the things that I'm accountable for and these are the things that I'm not accountable for, like an a la carte buffet, right?

We don't pick and choose. As a leader, everything is yours. Whether you want it to be or not, you have to be able to ask, what am I willing to take as my role in this situation, in this outcome?

I worked on a campus and I had a four minute walk from my car to my desk. And I prided myself on walking, talking, texting, emailing, eating my breakfast, and any other thing I could physically multitask during those four minutes.

And I thought I was 100% accountable to my obligations as a CEO. But here's what I missed. This was a four-minute walk across the campus with employees walking past me.

I missed being accountable for the impression I was leaving on them as their leader. I had to be willing to take responsibility for my role in creating their culture, creating their impression of me in that moment.

They didn't care that I was getting things done on my list. They cared how they were made to be, feel, when I walked by them.

You have to share these personal lessons. Is it comfortable for me? Do me to talk about my failures? No.

It sucks, honestly, but I've learned from them and others can learn from them, and that's exactly what an accountable leader does inside of their team.

They make it safe by talking about their struggles and where they have grown and how that has improved their leadership.

All right, last. A leader is a listener. They are somebody that fosters trust and engagement, and they approach conversations with curiosity, not certainty.

Proverbs says, he who speaks first appears right. One of the first things I watch with my clients is if they are the first one to talk in a meeting, are they the first one to give their opinion?

And then follow up with, okay, guys, what else? Who else? Who else thinks what? What do you guys think?

After they give their opinion. This is a surefire way to get false agreement, and it insulates you from the vital information that you need.

You must get information, feedback. You must stay open and curious. The most important and probably powerful person in the room is doing the least amount of talking and they're doing the most listening.

Be curious. Do not be the expert in the room. This is a form of self-leadership. Self-leadership is a strategic advantage.

We have covered how to be more engaged with your team to lead from curiosity, how to take accountability, how to know your strengths.

And your blind spots by getting feedback and leading from importance and not urgency. These are four places where you can sort of do a check-in, right?

When you lead yourself, your teams are more engaged. Decision-making improves. Your time gets freed up. And the organization becomes more aligned and innovative and resilient.

The bottom line is everybody wins when a leader gets better. Today was about leading yourself, one of the three leadership domains that we're going to cover in these special episodes.

Thank you for listening to this special episode. In the next episode, we will explore leading others. You earn the right to lead others after you have shown your team and your direct reports, your ability to lead yourself.

So practice some of the things that we talked about today. Remember, leaders are always watched. You bring the weather.

 And when you lead yourself better, everyone around you is going to see it. Take care.