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 Every week around here, we dismantle the outdated hierarchical leadership systems that keeps leaders like you stuck in the weeds and break down how to build a self-managed team that thrives without you at the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.
Are you leading from a place of deep. Trust and belief in yourself, in your ability to cast a strategy around, here is where I need to be focusing my team, my resources, my efforts to drive the biggest impact on the business and full chest trust in your ability to lead your team on executing that strategy, that vision, or.
Are you leading from a place of constantly questioning yourself, your judgment, your discernment, your ability to be strategic, to set a solid strategy? Because here's the thing, if you don't trust in your own leadership. Then how do you expect your team to fully show up and get behind you? If you don't trust in your own leadership, then how do you expect those higher ups to see a potential in you to lead at higher levels, to lead more scope, more people, more budget, more resources.
And now some of you guys are like yeah, I've done that. I have the plan. I did the annual planning workshop. I set my OKRs. I developed all my smart goals for the team. But are you actually sticking to it?
Do you actually believe in it? Are you full chest behind it or did you simply go through the motions, fill out the template, to check the box.
Because the problem with all of those things is they're not real strategy. It's what we in corporate culture have tried to boil strategy down and overly simplify it into this thing that you can just fill out and say that you quote did strategy. But strategy is not a one and done thing, especially in today's corporate environment where things are constantly changing.
And this right here is why so many of y'all are leading from a place of reactivity, from a place of constant uncertainty of second guessing yourself because we don't trust our own strategic judgment. We have outsourced our strategic thinking to things around us, to the leaders up above us. To the tools, the templates, the processes, and so the second, we get into the year, we get back into the work, we immediately start second guessing them. People start coming to us with different priorities, with different needs, and we're like, Ooh, ugh. Maybe I need to prioritize that. Maybe we need to rewrite all of our priorities.
We have no leg to stand on. We can't say no, we can't come back with the ability to defend our priorities because we ourselves don't even fully believe in them. We ourselves don't even fully trust that we prioritized the right things. So right off the bat, we start second guessing ourselves.
We start looking to other people for validation. Oh they're saying this is a priority. Maybe we should go do that. Oh, here's the hot topic of the week coming down from, exec. Maybe we should go chase after that. One of the biggest issues that leaders come to me. And we're trying to make this transition into senior leadership is people not respecting their no.
People not respecting their team's capacity. Yeah, if you don't full chest, believe in your strategy, believe in your priorities, believe in where your team's capacity should be focused to drive the biggest impact, then why is anyone else going to believe in it? If they don't see that you aren't fully convicted, if they don't see that you aren't fully certain in your ability to focus your resources to drive business impact, then they will always override you with their priorities, with their goals, with their strategies, because they are more certain than you.
They full just believe that this is the best use of your team's time. And if you are sitting there with this , list of OKRs and 15 goals and this plan that you developed but you don't fully believe in, then you don't stand a chance and actually defending it. So you effectively begin outsourcing your leadership to everyone around you.
Now, the second thing I see happen when we don't trust our strategic capability, is that the second meaning we're not getting the results we wanted to see, or our team's not experiencing the shift we wanted them to experience, the change isn't going well. Whatever it is that we wanted to come out of our goals for this year, then we waver. We're like, oh, yep, we should shift because we're not certain in our strategy, we're not certain in our own capability to be strategic. And so when we set a strategy, it's like a I'm gonna set it, I'm gonna do it, but then I'm gonna look for validation that this is right.
I'm gonna look for validation in those around me. I'm going to look for validation in, it immediately providing results and people immediately agreeing immediately being on board with it. And if that doesn't happen, then I'm gonna disown it. Because I don't trust in my own skillset, in my own ability.
I'm not certain in myself. This is where we see leaders start to flip flop all the time. Oh, we need to focus on this. Nope, we need to go do that. Like we never give things the time to work.
We never see things through to fruition. And even worse, the second that we set a strategy and we're operating from this lens of seeking validation. What I find happens is we're constantly looking for every reason as to why it's not working.
When you are not certain in your strategy, in your ability to be strategic, you will constantly search for any sign you, you're on the wrong path.
We stop looking for all the proof of why this will work, and we start looking for all the reasons why this won't work. All the problems like we hyper fixate on every single issue, and I see it happen time and time again, is these teams who had a good strategy,
they got distracted with all these tiny problems. They started making up problems where problems didn't exist. We start nitpicking and obsessing over little details, little issues that don't really matter in the bigger picture because we do not trust our strategic judgment.
And we think it's just a matter of time before someone looks over and they're like, holy crap. What's going on over there before somebody figures out that we don't know what we're doing, that we don't have it all together, that our team isn't quote unquote perfect, and if something goes wrong, if something's not perfect, they're gonna start asking questions and we don't fully trust.
Our ability to defend our strategy, the decisions we've made, the direction we're taking our team. And if we don't believe in it, no one else is gonna believe in it. And the third thing that I see happen with leaders who do not trust their strategic capability is they feel the need to overcompensate. They don't trust that the strategy that they've outlined, the goals they have for their team.
Are enough, are valuable, enough, are going to get them seen as a high performing team. So what do we do? We constantly look for more. We constantly look to overcompensate, so we just chase after what everyone else is saying, all the busy work, all the fire drills, all the urgent requests, and y'all, every single time you push your strategy aside, you are saying, I do not trust.
That the things that I said should be the biggest priority for my team are truly the biggest priority. And instead, we're gonna go chase after this fire drill over here. Because if you had full chest conviction in your understanding of the business of where their biggest issues are, of where those biggest opportunities are and how to position your team to meet them, then you wouldn't be wavering when some fire driller, latest, urgent request comes up because that short-term gratification will never match up to that long-term plan that you have developed for your team.
And you have such unwavering conviction in that strategy you've set. Then of course you feel capable and confident in defending your team's capacity and their focus. Your lack of confidence in your strategic leadership is what's keeping you stuck from being seen as senior leadership material. Because while you might have the fancy strategy on paper, you presented the 27 slide PowerPoint deck with all the fancy graphs, at the beginning of the year, and everyone oohed and awed the second.
It's time to implement on that, to actually stand behind it. They're seeing you wave. They're seeing you second guess yourself. They're seeing the uncertainty in how you show up. They're seeing you default to the leadership of everyone around you who's yelling the loudest. They're seeing you get distracted, hyper fixating on problems or chasing after the newest, latest, and greatest shiny object to try and overcompensate.
And that's showing them that you are not confident in your strategic leadership. And if you are not confident in your strategic leadership, then how is a team expected to be confident in your direction to fully trust it and execute on it? If you are not confident in your strategic leadership, how are they supposed to be confident in giving you more?
What they are looking for at the senior leadership level is for somebody to lead the business. They don't want somebody they have to handhold, to validate, to refocus, and rebuild their confidence every five seconds because here's the thing, at the higher levels. You're going head to head with executive leaders and board members, and if you don't have full chest conviction in your strategic leadership and where you are leading your team, you will get eaten up and spit out.
If you want to step into senior leadership with full confidence it all comes back to your ability to master strategic leadership, your ability to understand the business, to understand business needs, and how to position your team to drive the biggest impact on meeting those needs and to actually lead your team to achieve it.
That right there, that skillset is the shift between you being seen as that great middle manager who's good at executing the strategy that other people set, and that leader, that one who has a vision, who understands how to position resources for maximum business impact and has full conviction in their ability and that's the difference from you showing up every single day and constantly wavering second guessing, looking for validation in everyone around you to being that leader who shows up in any conversation like you can. Come at me, ask me all the questions, challenge everything I'm saying, tear my strategy apart.
It will not phase me because I have done the work. I know and fully trust what is happening in the business and my ability to position my team to meet business needs and my ability to actually deliver on my strategy through my team. You cannot shake my trust in myself and my skillset because I've done the work.
But it takes mastering the skillset it takes doing the work, and it's not something that they teach most curriculums about leadership in, corporate leadership curriculums and. Books and podcasts and even a lot of like executive coaches are focused on more of those soft skills in leadership.
Here's how to project yourself as this confident leader ready for the next level. The networking, the how to, communicate in certain ways, how to ask certain questions. How to hone your quote executive presence. But y'all, you don't need any of that. If you've actually mastered strategic leadership.
You don't need to project yourself as a strategic leader if you are a freaking strategic leader. All of that comes naturally through the confidence, through the certainty you build in your skillset, and it's that gap that I continuously watched. Working with hundreds of leaders across two very prominent organizations that led me to create Liberated Leader because strategic leadership is a lost art that is no longer taught.
In most leadership curriculums we have started obsessing over performative leadership, playing the game, looking the part. Versus actually mastering the core capabilities that will you allow you to thrive at those higher levels. And so the things that we focus on in Liberated Leader is one, setting a strategy around business impact. Building that business acumen to be able to spot where are those gaps, where are those opportunities in the business, where you can position your team.
To have a massive impact on business results. Because here's the thing, higher up leaders, they care about one thing and that's business results, the bottom line. And so the more that we can connect the work your team is doing and impacting the bottom line and the biggest problems facing your company.
The more they're going to trust your ability as a leader to understand where you need to be focusing your team and to actually use the resources you've been given to have the biggest impact on the business. And when they trust your ability to do that, what do they want to do? They want to invest more in your leadership.
They want to give you more resources, more budget, more scope. So step one, right when you jump into Liberated Leader, me and you are going back and forth. We're diving into what is going on in your business and how can we position your team to solve the biggest problems and drive the biggest. Business impact, and we're developing a very clear strategy around that.
Here is what we need to go prioritize. Here is what we're going to go do this quarter, and then we get to freaking work. Then the next part that we need to focus on is how do we actually empower our team to execute on that strategy? Because a strategy on a piece of paper is useless if our team actually isn't able to go and execute on this.
And now here's the key. Our team needs to be able to execute on it without us in every little detail because at senior levels of leadership, we don't have time to be micromanaging. Every little thing our team is doing, and this is another massive gap in leadership training, is that we teach you how to manage people in the sense of like performance development and performance management, but we don't teach you how to actually build the conditions, the structure, the system for your team to execute and be self-manage without you in the work. Corporate culture is still seriously obsessed with command and control style leadership, which is very great when you're managing employees who are working on an assembly line, not a team that we need to be fully empowered to go execute without us overseeing their every move.
So in the second. Module. We are fully focused on creating that structure and system that your team needs to actually go execute day-to-day operations on this. Without you having to be in everything. And that's what's creating the space, the mental capacity for what we need to do in module three, which is position you as that strategic authority.
That person who's not just the executor, but the one who sought after for their perspective, for their mind. The one who we're not just dumping random last minute request on, but the one that we're constantly pulling into. The biggest meatiest decisions, those strategic conversations, because we're like, oh my gosh.
Every single time they come in this room, they are pushing us to think differently. They see things that we don't see. They're adding value that we can't get anywhere else. So in this third module, we really dive into building your brand as a strategic authority, building your strategic perspective, your strategic thinking muscles.
Building up that business acumen so you can confidently walk into these high level conversations and hold your own. I seriously want you to imagine for a minute if you had full confidence in your ability to do those three things, to set a strategy to po, to position your team and set a strategy to drive.
Business impact results that matter on the bottom line to understand what to prioritize your team's capacity around in order to do to actually be able to empower your team to execute on that strategy without you having to be in the weeds to. To have built a brand around your strategic authority, to your mind, your perspective, not your ability to do, I want you to think about how you would be showing up differently each and every day.
If you felt fully confident in your ability to do those three things, how would you be leading differently?
How would your confidence shift? Your certainty shift? How would other people start to see you differently? Because that right there, that is the power of building your skillset in strategic leadership.
I am gonna drop the link to Liberated Leader Below, or if you want to send me a dm, I'd love to have a conversation with you about what your goals are and your specific situation over on Instagram. Let's go do the work y'all.
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.
