Seth Dobbs: What draws you to lead? Are you clear about who you are as a leader? Do you struggle to prioritize what you should focus on, what your team should focus on, and what things should get dropped? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs, and this is the Principle Driven Leadership podcast where I share principles of leadership along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be. These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader, in building organizations and in coaching others to become leaders themselves. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills.

I think they’re essential in helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact. And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results. And leadership is a journey. The step we’re taking today, involves thinking about why you lead and what defines you as a leader. In the previous episode I spoke a little bit about why we need leaders to help define a beacon for the future and guidance to getting there and then making it real.

But it’s also important for you to think beyond that, to specifically why you lead.

This is key to helping you to develop your own authentic leadership style. Your “why” also shapes your path and your thinking about what leadership is and how you really engage with your teams. Now, there are many different reasons to take that first step into the leadership journey and beyond. For me, it was really initially about dissatisfaction with organizational chaos and wanting to clear a path simply so the team I was on could do good work. As I progressed, my leadership continues to be driven by my “why”. And my “why” is that I want to make a positive impact on people’s lives. I like to grow people, I like to grow organization to help people get better and achieve the things they’re trying to achieve. Now over the years, my “why” has changed and clarified over time and yours likely will too. Without thinking about this, it’s actually easy to get lost in the tide of demand for your time to be overwhelmed by other people’s urgency.

So a former colleague of mine once shared a story that I thought fit pretty well in this theme. Jeff was on the internal communications team at a big marketing company. This company is specialized in creating marketing campaigns that were innovative, fun and revenue generating. And during the height of the pandemic, they were swamped with work. Companies around the world were looking for ways to get to their customers, at a time when they couldn’t actually physically be near their customers. So the atmosphere in this organization was electric. But also not surprisingly a bit chaotic. Teams were being pulled into more projects than usual, and it was hard to prioritize work when every project was the most important priority, at least to the people leading those projects. Beyond that the teams needed to interact with some of the other teams to get different, help, different skillsets. And so they really had to prioritize and schedule work accordingly in order to accomplish all of this across this complex ecosystem on time and on budget. And Jeff and the internal comms team was the hub of all of that. They were fortunately led by a smart, but sometimes distracted director named Marcy. Now Marcy was committed to providing the right information and the right amount of information to the company’s employees. But as this chaos grew, she was pulled into so many different projects that it was actually hard for her to keep them all straight and therefore hard for her to keep her team straight on what was needed from them.

Now, if you’ve ever had a leader or seen someone with over a hundred plus browser tabs open on their computer, this was Marcy. And it didn’t help that Marcy’s manager was really pretty similar, just trying to focus on everything that came their way.

One day Jeff and the rest of Marcy’s team decided to talk to her about it.

And they came to her during a team meeting and said, look, we’re getting super overwhelmed. There are so many teams coming to us with different communications needs, different internal projects, all of which have to get done right away. We need your help pushing back. And Marcy considered this for a moment. And responded that look, every project’s important.

All of our internal clients are equal and deserve equal time, commitment and quality of work. If you need help just see if you can spend less time with each of them and just redistribute a smaller amount of time to everyone.

It really wasn’t the answer that Jeff and his colleagues were looking for.

I can understand to a certain extent where Marcy was coming from. Marcy probably thought she was doing what was best for the company, by helping all the teams with all the projects they came to her team with. But in fact, her team’s time was not being spent well. They were getting more and more busy by just taking calls, reading emails that said similar things from multiple employees on the same team. And they were encountering teams that would keep changing the project specifications, would keep changing the timing.

And worst of all, some of these teams that came to Jeff and his colleagues wanted to micromanage the trivial design details around the communication.

Marcy’s team was overwhelmed because of all this and not able to deliver on their commitments. And unfortunately that’s what tends to happen when leaders think they’re doing the right thing by addressing everything that is asked of them. But you need to remember that as a leader, that’s not your role.

Your role is not to let the world around you control you. You don’t have an infinite energy to address everything that comes your way. Your role as a leader is to determine what is critically important for the organization, in particularly your part, and use that vision to prioritize your work and the work of your team.

Here’s the thing, not only was Marcy not clear about the vision for her team, Marcy didn’t have a vision for herself. That’s right. Not only do you, as a leader, need a vision for what your team or organization are driving to. You need to have a vision for yourself. For how you fit into the team you lead, how you fit into the broader organization, and shape where you want to be in the future. Having this in mind is essential to good leadership. Because the more clarity you have about yourself as a leader, the clearer, your intentions and goals become to those around you. It’s important because it’s really easy to get buried under everyone else’s sense of urgency, under all that organizational need and let that define who you are how you spend time, what your team is doing. So the principle to apply here is that responding is better than reacting. By knowing who you are, you can actually take a moment to control how you engage with all this demand, with that constant urgency that surrounds you, and respond in a way that drives you towards the outcome of your vision for your organization and for yourself.

If instead you react, you’re letting others define you. Or said another way. Reacting, that is following the swift, the emotional, the knee-jerk path, after some external stimulus meets you, means you’re defining yourself relative to what’s around you.

Now, changing this behavior, moving away from just reacting can be hard. I’ve coached a lot of people through this. I’ve seen a lot of different behaviors and many often rightfully so want to be able to react quickly. But often by just trying to react quickly, sometimes it’s the emotional reaction.

Sometimes rather than thinking through the complexity of priorities, just quickly have an answer. Really there’s a lot of different reasons that drive people to this. But it’s not great. You need to take control of yourself and the situation you’re in by having the moment to respond. So, how do you get there? I’ve found that by coaching people to think of it this way, they start making progress.

And that’s that at the end of each day, you should look back and think about where you reacted instead of responded and ended up because of that, not reaching the outcomes that you wanted. Or that you stepped away from your vision for yourself and for your organization. Then you should think about how you could have handled the situation differently to yield better outcomes. And over time, you should perform this analysis closer to the time of when you reacted. Until at some point you find yourself performing this analysis before you react. Now you’re creating the space to respond.

It’s not days and days, it can still be done in moments, but it’s by being deliberate. And using your vision to center you.

You can see this working for you as you start to gain clarity and control of yourself that you’re starting to give clarity to others that there’s less stress in the system, or at least the stress is reshaping itself more appropriately. You’ll see that other teams and other people start to perceive you more in the way that you want to be perceived and you become more effective because of all that.

In some ways you can think of your workplace as a complex puzzle with many pieces or in some cases, a complex set of puzzles with many pieces. Each battle you engage on each problem or issue you face. It’s like confronting a puzzle piece. And you’ll see that some pieces are essential for completing the overall picture that you’re working on. While others might be interesting they’re not actually critical or in some cases might not even be part of the puzzle that you’re working on. Therefore shouldn’t take any of your energy.

Having a clear vision for yourself allows you to prioritize the way you spend your energy by focusing on the pieces that are essential for achieving your goals and the organization’s mission.

Knowing where to expend your energy and when to save that energy for another day, it’s critical to your own success to your team success, into achieving that success with a lower risk of burnout.

You don’t want to get sidetracked by less important issues that may distract you from completing that big picture.

And that’s why vision is so important. And why it’s the first principle to help center you on that clarity. And this is important because we don’t have infinite energy to address everything, nor should you. You shouldn’t even try. The flip side, sitting back, isn’t leading and it’s not going to accomplish things either. So it’s finding that balance.

And in this story, if Marcy had found that balance, had learned to respond rather than react, she and her team would have been able to achieve more by doing less. Now if I had been there, if I had known Marcy, I would’ve counseled her to pick her battles to push back on projects that she didn’t feel were well aligned with her organization’s or the company’s vision and goals.

Each day you have an opportunity as a leader to shape who you are and what you want to be known for by being deliberate in how you respond to the things around you.

Marcy had an opportunity to be known as a leader who knows what’s most important and doesn’t overwhelm her team with trivial projects. And therefore be known as an effective leader and an effective business partner. But instead she let herself be defined as the person that never says no. Which I’ll tell you when you’re trying to establish yourself as a leader, is ineffective.

So I want you to think about. why you lead and what do you hope to accomplish through leading. And consider the longterm benefits of having a well-defined vision for yourself. How does this vision contribute to your own success? Your team success and the overall success of your organization and mission? And think about what’s one thing you can do differently today that will allow you to better respond rather than react when distractions come your way. Because you know they will.

Thanks so much for joining me, please subscribe and share with a friend if you liked it. Send thoughts and questions to me at contact@pdlpodcast.com and I’ll address a few towards the end of the season. Join me next episode, where I’ll talk about some ways to define your own guiding principles.