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 Every week around here, we dismantle the outdated hierarchical leadership systems that keeps leaders like you stuck in the weeds and break down how to build a self-managed team that thrives without you at the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. Okay, you guys, I asked you last week on Instagram what you guys wanted to hear more about, and you guys overwhelmingly said the self-managed team. And this isn't surprising as we're starting to see more and more leaders who not only crave but need a self-managed team because the demands of leadership has become.
So high that we no longer can lead from this place of having one foot in leadership and one foot in essentially holding our team together, keeping them aligned, keeping them moving in the right direction, solving problems, fighting fire drills, quality, controlling, we can't do both.
Because the demands of leadership have become so high. And we could go into a whole nother podcast about that, around how, the world of work has changed so much and the constant uncertainty and change. There's a lot more strategic demands being placed on leaders. No longer can set an annual strategy in January and expect to just deliver against that till December.
Strategy is happening constantly. We're constantly sensing and adapting and adjusting, and because of this, we as leaders, we can't. Strategy isn't just something that's like a nice to have. It's a constant. And we therefore need to be able to have a team that we can fully depend on to take ownership of outcomes.
But not just that, but who's that thought partner right alongside us? Who's thinking strategically, creatively innovating, problem solving? And I think when it comes to empowerment, we've done a lot of leaders and teams a disservice because empowerment's become something that's very surface level. It's very inspirational.
You're, we're inspiring and motivating teams to be empowered with our words, but very few leaders and honestly, I'll go as far to say. People teaching leadership and teaming are talking about how to empower teams, not in the feel good, fluffy, rah, inspirational, empowerment way.
That's just what on the surface, like if you think about an iceberg that's just like the tip of the iceberg above the waterline, and that's what most people are talking about. Very few are doing the work to actually empower teams by shifting the way that we operate, what's happening below the iceberg, and this is.
Actually really detrimental to teams, and I see it all the time in consulting work, is I'll go in and a leader's, like I told them, they're empowered. I, updated their job descriptions to be super strategic and creative and innovative. I, built out these new competencies for them to follow, and yet they're not stepping up.
And I'll go and I'll do focus groups with the teams. And it's the same thing every time y'all, they're like, we want to do that. We want to be empowered, but you've dropped us in a system where it's not possible. I'm trying to take ownership and prioritize and help direct where we need to be focusing, but nobody will let me in the door for the strategy conversations because I don't have the right title.
I want to innovate. I want to try new things and test and learn, but whenever I come up with a new idea, you are telling me I have to, develop out this giant PowerPoint to get approval to then socialize with 15 people, and then maybe three months later I can test it. And now it's no longer even a thing.
We're telling them that they're empowered, but we're not actually doing the work to shift the system that they're operating in to empower them. We're essentially holding them to a higher expectation and then, tying their hands behind their back and saying, why can't you hit that? And it is essentially made empowerment for me, has really just become the latest corporate buzzword, essentially rebranding traditional hierarchical leader at the center command and control leadership because you cannot tell me a team is empowered if we have not done the work to shift the system.
Because most teams, most companies are still operating off of command and control hierarchical leadership models, and it is nearly impossible to be empowered in that model. Empowerment is not just a buzz word. It's not. A motivational, inspirational speech and it's not, somebody that you hire.
It's not like an innate quality that you can hire for, because you could have the most empowered person who's super accountable, super strategic, super innovative, but you stick them in this system and they will struggle. Empowerment is actually getting into our ways of working, how we operate as a team, how we lead as leaders, and actually shifting every single part of that model.
From leader at the center, command and control, bureaucratic to truly empowering self-management, co-ownership, autonomous. And that's what most people aren't talking about. And that's why we see so many leaders, so many teams struggle to truly make the shift to these autonomous teams that are thought leaders, owners, innovators, problem solvers.
Few. Okay. Okay, so getting off my soapbox for a minute. So when we talk about, actually shifting. Our system to empowering teams. And there's really five levels of empowerment. So there's that like inspirational empowerment that we just talked about, and that's what's like above the surface, above the waterline, the tip of the iceberg.
And then there's actually shifting how we operate. And that's everything below the waterline, the. Base the meat of that iceberg. And what I talk about inside of Liberated Leader is there's four different levels below that iceberg of shifting how your team operates to being that autonomous self-managed team.
There's giving ownership over outcomes, giving context, giving authority, and shifting our systems. And so on. Today's podcast, I really wanted to talk about. That second one, giving context, because this is something I don't feel like I've brought to the podcast, and so I wanted to bring this forward because this is one of the most critical pieces, especially for you guys who are saying like, my team's not problem solving.
Like I hear it a lot, they're good. They're good at maybe owning the work and taking responsibility, but they're not thinking strategically in their own right. They're not problem solving. They're not innovating in their own right. And a piece of that comes down to context. It's giving our team the information, the bigger picture, the full story to operate from.
I think we as leaders take this for granted because as we climb the ladder, we don't realize the privilege that we are afforded to have that information, to have the title, to sit in those meetings, to be on that email thread to, have the connection with those peers. When we walk by them in the hallway, we can ask them questions and we don't understand the amount of information that we're privy to.
And because of that, we're able to connect dots and see things and make better decisions and come up with better solutions purely because of the information we have. And what happens is we forget that our teams aren't privy to that. They don't get to sit in those rooms. They don't get to hear the discussion.
They get to hear what was passed down through, seven layers of a game of corporate telephone that's been, edited and massaged and, cleaned up by four rounds of the communications team to make sure it's palatable by everyone. And it's like this very watered down little crumb that they're operating from.
And then we wonder why they're not, making the same decisions that we are, why they're not coming up with these solutions or connecting dots like we are. Because we haven't given them, we haven't put them on a level playing field. And I think the first part of this comes from the fact of, again, traditional hierarchical leadership of I'm the leader.
I'm the one who's supposed to be at the table. I'm the one who's supposed to be on the email chains. I'm the one who's supposed to be, communicating these big decisions. My team below me is the executors, but. If you are saying you want an empowered, self-managed, autonomous team taking ownership, that can't be the case anymore.
And a lot of people will push back. That's the way it's always been around here. That's, they would never let us, bring in the specialist doing the work into this meeting. And I call BS y'all. I call bs. I have worked in some of the most. Old school hierarchical companies , and I had no problem bringing the analyst who did the work to the meeting with, the chief Strategy officer of Delta Airlines.
Why? Because they did the work. They were the most knowledgeable about it, and they sat in front of that individual and they blew them outta the water, regardless of the fact that they have Analist title. Next to their name, we say that our team is empowered, yet we continue to fall victim to traditional.
This is the way it's always been done, hierarchical leadership norms. And I cannot tell this individual that they are empowered and have full ownership of their work, but oop. You can't be in the meetings where we're talking about your work and making decisions on it, but oop, you're gonna have to, you're gonna have to come to me and tell me what questions you have so I can bring them to the meeting and then I'll come back and relay information to you after the fact.
But, oop, you are gonna have to put it into, a presentation and upskill me on the topic, and I'm gonna carry it forward and present it for you. Yeah, we're talking outta two sides of our mouth. We can't say you are empowered, but then not actually invite them into the rooms. Because here's the thing, if you've ever thinking back on your career, if you've ever been in that situation where a leader comes to you and they're like, Hey.
I was in this meeting, this thing happened, and they give you like a 22nd synopsis and they're like, I need you to run with this. Go do this thing. And you're like, okay, I have so many questions. And there it is. There's no way you are going to be as effective as if you had been in the room and been a part of that conversation.
And it's gonna take you 10 times longer because you are having to ask these questions and think about what you missed and what you don't know, and you. There's, it's just a completely different ballgame than having been in the room and seen the conversation and see how we got to this place and why we chose option A over B.
And, the different points that were brought up and the discussion that was had and, where there was tension in the room and who disagreed and who didn't. And you don't have any of that. You are essentially trying to execute something when we've given you like one piece of a larger book.
And so the first piece of giving your team the context they need is bringing them into the conversations. If we're discussing work that they have ownership over, that they're responsible for, they should be in the room. They should be on the email chain, not just CC'd on the email chain, like they're the owner of the work, they're responding, they're the name.
I see that a lot. It's like you are the owner of the work, but I'm still the face of it as the leader. I'm the external forward facing person who owns that work because I own the team, right? That's hierarchical command and control leadership, whether we'd like to admit it or not. If they own the work, they're the face of the work.
They're the ones in the meetings, they're the ones presenting it. Will it take time to get there? In some cultures, yes, and that's the work we do inside Liberated Leader, but that's the first piece of them having the context to be innovative, to be strategic, to make better decisions is being in the room where the context is happening.
The second piece is we stop. Hiding and protecting. I hear the word protecting a lot. I'm protecting my team from the chaos, from, the mess that's happening in the business. And again, it comes from a good place. I, I hear it a lot of, I as the leader in the umbrella protecting my team from all the crap happening above.
And I, it comes out of a good place. But the problem is you're protecting them from incredibly important context and that, quote unquote crap and mess and chaos. They need to know that because that could potentially be affecting their work. That could potentially be the thing that, they need to be shifting based off of, and.
Too often do we wait until the very last second to drop something because I don't want to create panic or we don't have all the facts. I don't have all the details. We're still in conversations about it. It's just better that it stays behind closed doors and that is us.
Again, inhibiting our team from stepping up and being true owners because how can they be true owners of work if they don't actually know what's happening? If we've put them in this like perfect little world where everything's safe and happy and rainbows and butterflies, until we deem it safe enough or we have enough information enough.
For this like big issue that's happening, we're cutting funding, we're, we're halting that project they've been working on whatever the, hot topic, uncomfortable information is and we drop it on them and it's if they would have been a part of the conversations upfront, if they would have had insight into this all along.
They could have prepared, they could have shifted how they're operating. They could have been making better decisions. They could have been a part of problem solving, of pointing out, different solutions. They're the ones closest to the work, the supposed owners of the work I, so they should have insight into that.
And the reality is the same thing is happening to you as leaders. Is the layers up above you or only feeding you the information that they feel is palatable, that they feel is safe, that they have put through seven rounds of communications specialists to make sure that there's no triggering buzzwords in it and it's in it.
Inhibiting you from doing your best work as well. From developing strategies, from problem solving, from preparing, and this is why we see so many teams suffering from like this whiplash of, Hey, I had these priorities. I had my team aligned around this goal. I knew what I was doing. We were all good. And then all of a sudden, like they dropped this bomb on us out of nowhere.
And like we had to scramble to change everything and adjust everything. And it's because they've known about it for months, but they've been behind the scenes figuring out how to communicate it and develop a 17 part change management plan to make sure no one gets upset and it's like they're upset because you just dropped it on 'em and they could have spent all of this time prepping and planning and preparing.
And you cannot tell me that. You want your team to be owners of work, to be accountable for their work, to be problem solvers and thought leaders, but you don't trust them to handle a piece of information, to be adults about it. To understand and to know that this is a constantly evolving situation and we're talking about it and I'm bringing it to you and keeping you aware of it.
I if you can. If you cannot expect them to handle that, then how are you expecting them to take ownership and accountability over work? It's, again, speaking outta two sides of our mouth. So the second part of context and giving them what they need to actually fully own their work is stop shielding them from the sausage making.
It's giving them the context, giving them the behind the scenes. E and it's even giving them the lay of the land of, there's some tension between these departments right now because finance wants this and sales wants that, so that way they're not walking blind into sit situations that they had no idea about.
It's giving them little heads ups, like we talk about this concept in Liberated Leader, where every single team meeting, we call them action meetings we have this five minute period where you as the leader are just saying Hey here's what I'm hearing and seeing and observing in my, my, at my level.
Here's the tensions I'm seeing play out here's, I was in this meeting and this thing came up. There is really nothing about it yet, but I just felt, the room tense up and people get real passionate about this topic. And so I just wanted to put it in your guys' ear that this is something that people really seem to be caring about and we just need to be thinking about it.
It's just like little things that you would almost never. You are probably not even thinking about right now when you're sitting in meetings, we start to draw that out and we feed our team information because the more pieces, like literally picture a book, it's like right now you're having your team operate off of that single page.
And my job as a leader is how can I fill that book up with as much information context knowledge. Because the more that they have, the better decisions they're gonna make, the better strategies they're going to recommend, the more they're gonna be able to connect dots, the more they're going to feel confident in, switching things up, testing and trialing and doing things like that.
Fill the book up with as many different sources as we can. So it's one, bringing them into the spaces. It's to stopping to pro, stopping. What are words, stopping to protect them. Stop protecting them from the sausage making and instead practice radical transparency, opening the floodgates. And then the third one is a little bit different.
And again, this same thing applies to you as leaders, which is making them stewards of the business. I remember when I was early in my career, we would have, earnings calls and our leader would sometimes sit in on them and they would mention them. But that was about it. But there was no called to sit on them.
It wasn't required. It wasn't something that was really encouraged. And I look back on that now and I think how crazy is that? That investors in this company know more about the company, the state of our business, than the people working in it, than even leaders leading it when we don't even have directors showing up to these calls.
And this was a big company. Big company that, you know. And leaders weren't even showing up to earnings calls, let alone teams. And it flabbergast me. But this is what happens as companies grow. Like when we're in small startups, it's a small environment. Everyone knows what's happening in the business, right?
We're all a part of it. We're all affected by it. But as we grow, somewhere along the way, we detach ourselves from the business. It's very, again, much hierarchical leadership. That level of the business that's for like VPs, executives, they worry about that. We just need to focus on our little function, our little team, our little slice of the pie.
We need to become the best in that, the best finance function, the best revenue management function, the best product development function. Doesn't really matter what's happening up above, they'll tell us, they'll cascade it down. We have completely detached ourselves from what is happening in the broader business and just focused on becoming functional experts.
And what happens, and again, I'm talking about this from both lenses, both from you and your leaders and from your team that we want to empowered and you is. We lose all of our power to those above us. We can't plan because they haven't given us clarity. I hear that a lot. I can't create a plan and an instructure and alignment for my team because I haven't gotten clarity from the top.
We don't know what to prioritize. Because the senior leadership team is bickering and they can't choose, one person's telling me one thing and another person's telling me another. We don't know how to go develop a strategy unless they first cascade down and tell us what they want. They hold all the power because they are the ones who know the business.
They're the ones with the context. And essentially I'm just gonna say it like we put our brains on ice. We put our brains on ice without even knowing it. We've fallen into this traditional hierarchical, the leaders at the top think we execute and it, we see it at every level. E, even at director level, it's like the leaders at the top, at the executive level, they're looking at the bigger picture in the business.
They know what's really happening. They'll cascade down the priorities, the objectives, the new metrics, and then I'll just look at my little functional lens and I'll plan within that based off of what they feed me.
And it's exactly why. We constantly are feeling this whiplash. We constantly are feeling like we're behind, like we're reacting, like we can't keep up. Why? Because we're missing context that if we had six months ago when the leaders above had it, we wouldn't feel reactive. We are putting ourselves in this predicament because we're not doing the work to build the context that we need.
We're just simply depending on the layer above us to give it to us. And when they don't give it to us in time or if they don't, provide the clarity that we need or the priorities we need, then we can't do our job. And so one of the biggest things we talk about in Liberated Leader is we don't wait.
For those above us, we don't use the excuse, we can't provide clarity, we can't prioritize, we can't strategize because we don't have clarity from the top. We go out and we get it. We become business leaders, not functional leaders. And I'm not just talking about us as leaders. I'm talking about all the way down into our teams.
They're not just functional experts. We're building business acumen and them as well. And that 100% y'all is our job as leaders is making sure our teams are fully aware of what is happening in the business. And I'm not just talking about the surface level, oh, here's the latest update happening in our companies that we're doing this new initiative over here, like very vague, high level, like I'm talking.
They're stewards of the business. They understand revenue streams, they understand major costs, they understand what's happening in our market. They understand. Who our biggest competitors are. They understand what they're doing. They understand where we're positioned in the market. Are we a leader?
Are we trailing? They understand what levers that we could potentially pull to improve profit, like they understand the business. And if I'm talking about this right now and you're like, Ooh, like I, I'm not there. I don't know that we've got work to do. Because there some tough love you guys. There is no way that we can be good stewards of our function of our team if we do not have this knowledge.
We exist to create value and drive impact for a business for the company that we've been hired to lead in. And if we don't have a deep understanding of what is happening within our business, how can you say that you are developing effective strategies? How can you say that you are capable of choosing what to prioritize, of making good decisions of solving the right problems?
You can't, and that is why you constantly feel dependent on the layer above you. And if you can, I want you to ask those same questions about your team.
If they, the reason they're struggling to make good decisions and come up with good solutions is because they're lacking this business acumen and we say, oh they're just supposed to be functional experts. How can they be great functional experts if they don't understand the business that they're serving?
And so the third part about giving them context is building business acumen. And this is on us as leaders, is about understanding the business ourselves and fueling our team with that knowledge so they actually understand the bigger picture that they're operating in. Because if your team's not connecting dots or making good decisions, or coming up with good solutions.
It is not the team, it's not the skill level. It's not even like a will issue. Nine times out of 10, it's, we haven't given them what they need in order to do and instead of going ahead and doing that, we just use it as fuel as well. I just don't have the right talent. I have to connect the dots. I have to do all the problem solving.
We use it to confirm the belief that we have, that we need to stay in the center of it all instead of doing the work to shift the system to actually empower them. I want you guys to take one piece of something that you learned today and bring it forward to your team. Bring them into those meetings, into those spaces that impact their work.
Stop shielding them from the business minutia. Take five minutes every team meeting and start sharing the context. And if you don't have the context to share, the other thing you're gonna do in that five minutes is start doing mini lessons on the business. Here's our biggest revenue drivers. Here's the cost drivers that are happening right now.
Our biggest cost that we need to be thinking about. Here's what's happening in the market. Start doing little mini educations. And see how not only your team, but you start showing up to conversations differently. Start making better decisions. Start coming up with better solutions. Start connecting dots that you didn't before.
Yeah. And if you're listening to this episode and you're like, that's what I want for my team, I want that team. Who's the thought leaders, the innovators, the ones that everyone wants at the table. 'cause it's like when we're in the room, it's like magic happens. Like we, we ask these questions, we come up with these ideas that everyone's holy crap.
That's what I want for my team, but I'm struggling. To get into those lay lower layers of empowerment, to create the system where they have the context, the authority, that we've truly shifted out of command and control style leadership, and into this self-management way of working.
And I just don't know how to make it happen. You need to be inside liberated, leader. Because that's exactly what it's for. It's about taking you step by step to shift every single part of how you're working from centered around you as the leader to co-ownership with your team.
And you have me rolling up my sleeves, getting right down in the trenches alongside you, who has done this across hundreds of teams and 40 plus different functions guiding you each and every step of the way. So I'm gonna drop that link in the show notes below, or if you're interested, sending me a DM and we can talk more about your specific situation and team.
Okay guys, 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.
