Welcome to the Liberating Teams podcast. I'm Holly Breeding team psychology practitioner and org effectiveness consultant. Every week around here, we dismantle the outdated hierarchical leadership systems that keeps leaders like you stuck in the weeds and break down how to build a self-managed team that thrives without you at the center.
Because when your team has the clarity systems and ownership, they need to lead themselves. You finally get to lead strategically. It's time to liberate the way you lead.
Hello. Hello. Welcome back to the podcast. Today we are covering a topic that so many of you guys come to me with. This is what a lot of my leaders inside Liberated Leader come to me with, and that is. Either I have been told I need to be more of that strategic thinker, that strategic leader, in order to continue to grow my leadership career, or I know I want to make that shift from that tactical leader and being seen as a doer to being that leader
who is seen as the visionary, the thought leader, the advisor, the one that everyone wants to have a seat at the table who is constantly being turned to, to help solve the big, the meaty problems at those highest levels. That is what I want to be known for, but I just don't know how to get out of being seen as that tactical leader.
And this is so common and so many leaders struggle with this because of how we came up into leadership, our path into leadership. The reason why most of you guys are in the role that you are in today is because you were really dang good at getting shit done. You were the one everyone relied on to solve the problems, to solve the fire drills, to be constantly available to, answer all their questions, to constantly be busy, to constantly be, working long hours.
Like it's the hustle, the grind that often is what allows us to climb into higher levels of leadership. And that's who we become. We become really great doers. We become that team who is, the tiger team, the one who's able to do everything for everyone. You've got a problem. Throw it at us.
We can make it happen. We do everything and the kitchen sink. We're constantly chasing after the endless, requests, the endless urgent problems, the endless fire drills. We equate our team's value. Our team's worth our team's identity with our ability to make everyone happy. And you know what?
Up until a point it works. People start to see us to depend on us as the executors, as the one that they can go to, and who will turn the deliverable around in record time, who will take care of the fire drill so I don't have to worry about it, who will drop everything and answer my question.
And there is a strategy of building recognition through that pathway. Of being the tactical leader of your team's value in being the doers, the executors. But here's the problem with that is one, you are quickly going to find yourself on the hamster wheel. You are constantly going to be running to keep up with the endless demands, with the endless urgent requests, with the constant work being dropped on your team's plate, but it will never be enough.
You're constantly running, but you're not going anywhere. There's constantly more being flooded onto your team. And when your worth, when your team's value is tied to your ability to do, to execute. It's a fast track to burnout because if my team's reputation is that All Star team, the Tiger team, the one who can, be everything to everyone, then everyone dumps on us constantly endlessly.
And the second we have to say no. Then, oh my gosh, we're no longer gonna be seen as valuable. If we can't do everything to everyone, what's our worth? It's not sustainable. And then here's the second thing. Executors are a dime a dozen. And I know that's gonna trigger some of y'all. I know you're gonna say no, that's not true.
It is. I've heard it talked about at the higher levels, I've heard those teams, you know that everyone is oh my gosh, they're always available. They're always here. They're the first ones in the last ones to leave. They're constantly busy,, but then in the same breath, those executive level leaders say, but I don't actually know the value they're providing.
Because they're executors, they're doers, and people who can execute and get shit done. That's easy to find. But what we want to be known for, what we want to be seen as is strategic leaders. As those individuals who provide unique value to this company that no one else can, and because we provide that unique value and have this unique thought leadership, guess what, we're automatically gonna start to get those seats at the table.
We're automatically gonna be getting tapped for those high level projects. 'cause we do shit no one else can. Nobody's begging for the doers to have a seat at the big strategy tables. You are the one who's getting handed the byproduct of those conversations,
if you want to be the one at the table you have to switch from being the tactical leader to the strategic leader. Okay let's get specific. You want to make the shift or you've been told you need to start being more of that strategic leader. What do you do? A lot of people struggle with this because they're , strategic thinking is so broad.
What does it mean to think strategically? I clear the space on my calendar, what do I do with it? Do I sit there and stare at a whiteboard and hope ideas come to me? Like, how do I quote, think strategically. So I wanted to give you guys some structure about how I would go about this. So if I was tasked with being a more strategic leader, there's three things that I would focus on.
And I'm assuming we've already created space to do these three things. If you are in that position where you're like, I don't, I'm so far in the day-to-day operations and if I remove myself, everything would crash and burn well, then you need to be inside liberated leader, the whole premise of liberated leader.
And a lot of my other episodes is all about building that self-managed team who can operate on a day-to-day basis and deliver results without you being in the weeds. So you can pull up and lead strategically. So we're already assuming you've created that space. So that's step zero is create the space, not only capacity, but also mental capacity.
That's huge as well. So we've created some space. We've got, an hour, 30 minutes, whatever it may be on our calendar to start being the strategic leader.
So the first thing I'm going to do is get really clear on who I serve, and I'm going to obsess over them. So every single function serves someone. You exist to serve someone. Now it's really obvious. If you are serving that end user, you know you are the digital team and you are creating an app or a website for that end user, customer , that's really easy.
We understand our customer is the end user, but what a lot of people don't realize is those internal corporate functions, you exist to serve someone. You are not just the finance partner. You exist to serve department heads in their finances. That's your customer. You are not just the talent acquisition team.
You literally exist to serve department heads , in getting the exact talent they need. But too many of us operate like we're a given, like we're the finance department because you need a finance department, and so we do finances. Okay, cool. That's how you stay in the tactical is just by operating your process.
We just go through the budgeting process and the problem that happens. Is when we operate through that lens, when we operate through the lens of like we are a function and we exist because we have to exist. You need a finance department, you need a sales department, you need a marketing department, you need an HR department, and we just exist to do HR is we start making decisions and we start delivering our service through our lens.
And what we want to do and what we think is right, like a great example is I was having this conversation with a leader in Liberated Leader who leads a project management function. So their team is responsible for leading these large scale messy projects for in service of other leaders of these other teams.
And so they were talking about, we follow the rigorous, pMP certification, project management process, and people hesitate to involve us in the project because it takes longer and how do we get. People to, be okay with it taking longer and see the value in this drawn out process.
And 100% there's merit in that question, but I challenge them to think through it from, you are not a corporate sanction function. Instead, I want you to think of yourself as a project management, like consulting agency, a small business. This is your external customers that are coming to you and saying, Hey, we're gonna pass on signing a contract with you because it's just taking too long to get these projects done.
Now one avenue is for sure showing the benefit of why this process is important. The other avenue is to say. Is every single part of this process truly important, or is there a way that we can provide the same results better, faster, easier, because they have other options, right? If I'm a small business, there's, a million other project management agencies they can go work with, and if someone else can do it better, faster, or easier, I'm going to lose their business and I'm going to go out of business.
That is the same lens. I want you to see your function through. You no longer exist to just exist. I want you to think as if you are a small business and in order to maintain business. You have to understand your customers. You have to know who they are. You need to understand what they're struggling with.
You need to understand what matters to them, and you need to build your product or service through that lens. That's strategic leadership. It's not just optimizing how you work, it's truly seeing yourself as a service or a product. Provider. So ask yourself, who does your team serve? Who is the end user of your team's service or product?
And then obsess over them. Get to know everything about them. The first, if I opened up, 30 minutes on my calendar every week, I wouldn't be staring on a whiteboard. I would be meeting with my customers. I would be asking them, what are your frustrations? What are your challenges right now? What are your biggest problems that if you were able to solve it would unlock something for you?
You'd be able to do better work? What do you wish we could do for you? What's your favorite thing that we do for you? What's the biggest frustration in using us? Because I can sit here and just continue to operate from a place of, deciding what I think is best or what I want to do, or taking a best guess, or looking at benchmarks of what other people who you know are in my function or doing at other companies and try and copy and paste and hope it works.
Or I can go talk to my customers and guess what? When you talk to your customers and you build with them in mind,
you are able to generate more value, more impact for them, and that's when they start inviting you to the table. You don't have to push your way to the table. They're inviting you. You don't have to push your way into projects. They're pulling you, you're creating demand. Instead of forcing them to use your product or service.
So the first thing I'm doing is I am understanding who is my end user, who is my customer, and I am obsessing over them. Everything I can understand about them, I'm learning it. The second thing I'm doing is I'm understanding the impact my team can make.
So now that I understand where their biggest gaps are, where their biggest frustrations are, what they want from us the most, now I can get clear, okay, here are the two to three things we need to focus on in order to drive value for our customer. So I'm hyper fixating on those. Those become our goals for the next quarter.
How much progress can we make on these? If it's outside of our control, if this is a big, meaty thing, how can we just make it 10% better, 5% better? How can we just take the first step? How can we get creative or innovative of how we can do it? Maybe without the budget or without the fancy tool, without all the resources.
I think it's so interesting that. We do this annual goal setting process, and a lot of us do it through the lens of, what we think is best as leaders, what we want to go after, or maybe what our more senior executive leader wants us to do. I don't see a lot of finance partners going out there before the annual goal setting process and talking to all the department heads.
About what they need, what they're doing well for them, , where their biggest gaps are in their service, and then planning their goals around that. We just assume that we know best, but imagine again, if you were that small business, you were an independent finance firm, and you just decided what you wanted to do each year.
Without talking to your customers, your business would burn to the ground. Your customers should be the ones informing your strategic priorities, your goals, because if they're the ones informing it, that allows us to make a bigger impact.
You can develop all those fancy reports and that new tool and all that stuff, but if nobody uses it or if nobody actually cares about it. Then it's not value add. So the second thing I'm doing is I'm getting really clear on those biggest gaps, those biggest opportunities that we can solve for our customer, and that becomes my quarterly priorities.
And yes, I said quarterly. Not annually. I talk about this concept a lot. Not a big believer in annual planning. I like to focus on quarterly priorities. So every quarter I am talking to my customers. I'm figuring out what are our biggest gaps, what are they like, what don't they like? I am setting my quarterly priorities based off of that, and then that quarter we are pushing.
To make as much progress as we can on those two to three gaps or those two to three opportunities. And then at the end of the quarter, we're reassessing, we're talking to our customers again. Okay, what's working well? What's not working well? Okay. Those things that we thought were gonna be phenomenal for you, we built out this whole fancy dashboard that we thought you were going to be drooling over.
You actually hate. Cool. We only lost 90 days on it, so we're not gonna commit to putting a whole year into this and then find out like that actually was crap. We're continuously letting our customers drive and guide our strategy because they're the ones we serve. We're not trying to be everything to everyone.
We're focused on our customers and their needs. Because when our customers are happy, they're singing our praises. They're inviting us to the table. They're bringing us in more, which allows us to drive more impact. Now, the last thing that I'm focusing on is innovation. How can I continuously improve my product or service?
How can I deliver more impact, better, faster, easier? Now, a lot of this is looking at internal team operations. So it's really hard to provide great service or a great product to my customer if my backend operations are total shit. If nobody understands who owns what, if my team is tripping over each other.
If our processes are confusing as crap, if our tools are from like the 1980s. If they're constantly having to come to me to sign off on everything, of course they're going to struggle to create meaningful impact for our customer. So the last thing that I'm doing is saying, okay, I understand my customer and what they want.
I understand how we can make an impact. So now I'm gonna look internally to my team and I'm gonna say, okay, what's going to prevent us from doing that? What's going to get in our way? What's going to slow us down? What do we need to improve to be able to do this or to be able to do more, or to be able to do it better or to be able to do it faster?
And I'm selecting one, two, maybe three of those, and I'm adding that to my strategy for this quarter. So often teams think you can do one or the other. We're focused on day-to-day operations, or we're focused on improving our team and usually improving our team goes to the wayside and we just never do it.
But here's the thing. Improving your team is improving your day-to-day operations . It allows you to make more of an impact, allows you to do it better, and allows it to do it easier. Think about it. A lot of you, a lot of people struggle because in our day to day. It has become so advanced, so simple, so easy.
Like I can order my groceries on a click of a button, pull up, have them put in my car, and then there's another click of a button to where they can also bring me out my Starbucks with my order. Everything so simple, so easy, and then I go into my corporate office and everything is like ancient, like I, it's way harder than it needs to be.
Because we never take time to improve how we operate, and therefore that affects our service and our product. If you are the HR team and it takes the leader filling out 15 forms and four different systems to input their team's performance review.
That's a problem, and that's your problem because if you were an external, small business, your business would crash. It's not acceptable. We let it be acceptable. Be because we see ourselves as a required function. They have to use us. No stop operating from that lens. That's that tactical leader. I just show up and execute.
The strategic leader doesn't accept that. They see their customers and they're constantly saying, how can we do it better, faster, easier? And that starts with looking internally. Now everything. I cannot, on a liberating Team's podcast, not say this. Everything we just talked about when it comes to thinking strategically and transferring to that strategic leader, this is not a process you do on your own.
This is not something where you go lock yourself in a room and you have these conversations by yourself in front of a whiteboard. Include your team. Pushing your strategy onto your team, telling them, here's our customer, here's the impact we're gonna make. Go after this. They're not gonna feel excited about, they're not gonna feel driven by it.
Everything that we just talked about, you can do with your team. You can have them go talk to their customers and you can bring it back and find themes. What did you hear, what happened? Or maybe you go talk to the customers, you bring back the themes. Here's what I heard. And then you can have them talk about, the two to three biggest gaps they're seeing and really hone in on those insights.
You can then talk about, okay, if these are our two to three biggest gaps we're hearing from our customers, what's the impact that we can have? What are the goals we want to set for this quarter to improve these? How do we solve these and have them come up with solutions so they're 10 times more bought into them.
And then you can say, okay, if those are the two to three things that we want to go solve this quarter, what about our team's operations are gonna get in our way? What's gonna slow us down? What, where are we gonna have friction? I let them ideate on it. And then select two to three that they wanna focus on.
Bring your team along with you. And now the first time, yes. You are going through, you're learning, you're trying this out, that's fine. Go through it the first time on your own, but make it a commitment that you begin to facilitate this, these conversations with your team. Just add it on to your team meeting.
Have a conversation this week about who your customer is. Start there, start small. It doesn't need to be this big, terrifying thing, this big four hour workshop. Lord, help me know. Start small. Make it simple. Just start having the conversation. If you level up on your own, that's not gonna do you any good, because again, it's not about you and your ability to execute.
It's your ability to get through results through your team. So you need to be leveling up, and your team also needs to be making the transition from tactical to strategic, from doers to strategic partners, to strategic advisors. They have to make the shift too, so bring them along with it. Okay, y'all listening to a podcast doesn't drive change.
Doing the work does take something that you learned today and go put it into practice next week. Let's go do the work. Thank you for listening to the Liberating Teams podcast. If this episode hit home for you, don't forget to share it with another leader. Or if you've got 10 seconds, drop a five star review and it would mean the world to me so we can liberate more teams together. And if you try something for today's episode, come tell me how it went.
DM me on Instagram over at Liberating Teams, and I'd love to chat more about it. Now. Let's go change the world of work. One liberated team at a time.
