Episode 248 Transcript:

0:00:00 Ramona Shaw: This is episode 248 and we’re going to talk about thoughts or mental traps that keep leaders stuck. Here are the two questions this podcast answers. 1. How do you successfully transition into your first official leadership role? And 2 how do you keep climbing that leadership ladder and continuously get promoted? Although the competition and the expectations get bigger, this show, The Manage Track podcast, will provide the answers.

0:00:26 Ramona Shaw: I’m your host, Ramona Shaw. I’m on a mission to create workplaces where work is seen as a source of contribution, connection and personal fulfillment. And this transition starts with developing a new generation of leaders who know how to lead so everyone wins and grows. In the show, you’ll learn how to think, communicate and act as confident and competent leader you know you can be hi there and welcome back to The Manager Track podcast or this show. For those of you who’ve been listening to the podcast but haven’t seen our YouTube channel yet, check out the show notes and Visit us on YouTube. Subscribe so you get future episodes on your YouTube feed as well.

0:01:05 Ramona Shaw: So today we’re going to dive into what I believe doesn’t get enough attention when it comes to leadership development. And that is the mindsets, the beliefs, the thought, the internal identities that keep us stuck at lower levels, often in the tactical work and in the weeds of execution versus leading at a higher level, at a more strategic level and kind of commanding a room and showing up as more confident and influential leaders.

0:01:34 Ramona Shaw: As much as I believe that the tactical work of leadership development is really useful, in our programs, such as the Leadership Accelerator for new managers, we pride guides, frameworks, scripts, templates, resources to make it easier to apply what we learn. For example, when it comes to difficult conversations, hey, here are a few ways to introduce a conversation. Here are the different phases of a difficult conversation that you want to prepare for.

0:02:00 Ramona Shaw: Here is how you wrap up in an effective way, such a difficult conversation, or the same with feedback. When you give feedback that is fairly intense and it’s one of those sit down, tough conversations, that kind of feedback, then here’s the one thing that you do not want to miss that will change the dynamic of the conversation. Those are tactical suggestions that we provide and they’re valuable. But then at the same time, and this is what we cannot underestimate, we have to think about and address the internal dialogue that’s happening inside of our heads that will hold us back in patterns that aren’t helpful.

0:02:40 Ramona Shaw: And so the reason why our programs and our Leadership Accelerator, for example, is 12 weeks long is because these internal shifts don’t happen overnight or in a micro lesson, a two minute video, or even a one hour class. They take time. But what I want to do in this podcast today is to highlight what are some of these internal mental traps or thoughts that keep leaders stuck. And while we often talk about transitioning into leadership, what I’m going to talk about here are mental traps, thoughts that I observe in leaders, even if they have decades of leadership experience.

0:03:19 Ramona Shaw: So in the work with both new and experienced managers, the five particular mental traps are often hard to break, and they’re even more difficult to break if you’re not aware of them. So I want to break them down and explore not just why they’re problematic, but also give examples on how they show up so you can detect whether you’re falling into one of those traps yourself. And if you do, then know these are very common. There’s nothing wrong with where you’re at and it simply means, ah, there’s some work to do. I’ve seen something now that I didn’t see before.

0:03:59 Ramona Shaw: If you want to dive deeper and take this work further and accelerate your leadership growth, then join us in the leadership accelerator. Let’s hop on a call and have a conversation to see if this is the right program for you. So with that said, let’s dive in. I’m gonna go straight to it. The first one is the I must do everything mindset. And it’s not like you literally think you must be doing everything on the team. You realize, no, we’re a team and obviously I’m not doing everything.

0:04:28 Ramona Shaw: But it is kind of this idea that you feel like you need to roll up your sleeves. It says roll up your sleeve syndrome. The idea that good leaders must be very hands on with everything or with a lot of things. And it often manifests itself in an inability or lack of effectiveness in delegation. I hear managers say, like, I can’t delegate. My team is already too busy. But then my question is, do you actually know for a fact they’re too busy or are you assuming. Assuming they’re too busy. Employees want to be given the opportunities to grow and to develop.

0:05:09 Ramona Shaw: So while some team members may, yes, totally have a full play, they may still welcome taking something off your plate because they can see an opportunity for them to learn. It may also be that you make an assumption that they’re really busy, when in fact there aren’t. I can give you an endless list of situations with leaders where I ask them directly that question and they came back in the next coaching conversation and said, hey, I did a check in, I asked usually, I usually recommend asking on a scale from 1 to 5, how busy are you? Without going into too much details here, but what their assumption is is that they’ll be at a four and a half or a five and then they come back and realize like, actually no, the team is at the three and they all have capacity, take on more work.

0:05:52 Ramona Shaw: It’s just that, yeah, generally speaking, like we’re pretty good, right? And I’m full. But if you want me to delegate work, I can definitely make room for that. So if you think they’re too busy, make sure you know for a fact before you make that assumption. And then when you do want to delegate something, be transparent about your intention. You can say, hey, I’d like to delegate this project, but before I do, I want to check in on everyone’s capacity and see who might be interested to take this on.

0:06:22 Ramona Shaw: This could also be a good development opportunity. And then hear them out and see what they say. Let them have the option to help you. This mindset of like, I need to be all rolling up my sleeves and being all hands on shows up in how we run meetings. If you are doing all the talking in team meetings because you think that’s what leaders should do, like let’s say you present the goals for 2025 or you do a project review and you are the one doing all the talking and everyone else just listening, you’re missing out on the collective interaction between the team. It actually feeling like a team and there being collaboration. A study by MIT’s Human Dynamic Laboratory found that the most successful teams actually have distributed participation rather than the dominant leader driving the show.

0:07:16 Ramona Shaw: And so this is really important. Not only does it feel better, does it lighten your load, but it keeps people engaged and performance on the team high. So anytime that you notice yourself thinking, oh, I need to be doing this because I’m the leader, take a beat, ask yourself, is this really true when you onboard a new hire and you feel like, oh, I need to be the one doing all the onboarding work because I got to demonstrate that I am the leader and I, I’m the one who’s sort of like in charge here? No, you don’t. You need to do a few key things that no one else can do and then let the whole team onboard that new team member as a collective, collaborative sort of mini project for everyone to participate in. Moving on.

0:08:03 Ramona Shaw: Second sort of mental trap or thought to be aware of is this idea that the leader must be the most knowledgeable person in the room. This is particularly challenging when you start to manage specialists or subject matter experts that know more than you do. So here’s a common scenario. A manager tells me, hey, I’m getting a new team member in areas that I’m not so familiar with, and I’m a little bit nervous. So I think I need to learn and spend some time to learn about their field and the work that they do. So I can probably, you know, manage them.

0:08:39 Ramona Shaw: But wait a minute, do you really? The most effective leaders don’t try to be experts in everything. They create environments where experts can flourish. In Google’s Project Oxygen Research, which is one of the most often cited positive projects when it comes to studying great leadership and team leadership, found that technical expertise was actually one of the least important factors in what makes a great manager.

0:09:10 Ramona Shaw: What ranked higher were all the things such as ability to coach, to communicate and support career development. So yes, you need to know enough to help them understand how their role fits into the bigger picture. You need to know enough or at least be curious enough to learn about the work that they do to challenge their thinking, to make sure that you challenge assumptions that you’re able to assess what high standards are, what poor standards are.

0:09:38 Ramona Shaw: But that’s kind of about it. If you depend on that team member having respect for you as a leader because of your knowledge and your expertise, you’re going to keep a lid on your ability to grow as a leader. Because that only works so far. And once you break, you sort of move away from frontline leadership or you start to manage experts in different fields. Your main goal is to hire people who know a lot more than you do, right?

0:10:08 Ramona Shaw: And at that point you’ll have to let go of this mental trap that you need to be the most knowledgeable person in the room. The third trap here, mental trap I want to highlight in this episode, is this idea that senior leaders know the most or know the best. The idea that by virtue of their position and tenure, your senior leaders know better. While sure it’s often true that I have valuable experience and institutional knowledge, this mindset can be quite limiting for multiple reasons.

0:10:45 Ramona Shaw: First, it prevents you from speaking up when you see issues or opportunities. You may think, oh, they already know, or if they’re not bothered by it, if they don’t have an issue with it, then it’s probably not a problem. But your unique perspective, especially if you are closer to the day to day operations or you have different expertise than your senior leaders, you have an angle and a viewpoint of the organization that they don’t.

0:11:15 Ramona Shaw: So your diversity in the mix is a value add. No one else sees what you see. No one else has worked at the companies you’ve worked at before. No one else has exposure to exactly the same work or the same data or is able to connect the dots in the way that you do. Also, some people are wired to see your risks. You might be one of those you’re constantly looking at, what are the risks that I’m having to navigate here?

0:11:39 Ramona Shaw: Your leader might be a visionary. They don’t see that, they don’t pay attention to that. That’s not where their strength is. So don’t underestimate the importance of that. So on that point of diversity, McKinsey research shows that organizations with diverse perspectives and healthy debate at all levels, up and down, make better decisions and perform better financially. And on top of that, when you speak up and you don’t assume they know better, but you value your own position, your opinion, your perspective. Not only is that going to help your team perform better, but also senior leaders often evaluate the leadership potential of sort of up and coming leaders on their ability to be challenged and to have conviction when being challenged.

0:12:28 Ramona Shaw: When you talk about executive presence, this isn’t about agreeing with everything. It’s really about taking a stance and having the confidence to engage in a constructive dialogue. When it means to respectfully disagree with senior colleagues and make a case for your opinion, not to hear them say, oh, but I disagree with that and then immediately waver and agree with them just because they are more senior.

0:12:56 Ramona Shaw: I’ve seen many managers hold themselves back because they assume senior leaders have already thought through angles are a problem. But again, in the fast moving environment of business, no one person or group can have all the answers or can have thought about all the different things. Senior leaders have more problems on their plate than they can ever solve, more fires than they can ever put out. And it would then be on you to really bring your angle. And so don’t assume they’ve already seen it or already thought through it. The most creative and innovative organizations have what Amy Edmondson calls intellectual friction.

0:13:32 Ramona Shaw: So it’s this productive tension that comes from the different perspectives and challenging each other. Respectfully now, of course, I’m telling you this as to you be mindful with your senior leaders. Don’t make assumptions that they know everything. Some of the senior leaders may not be willing to engage with you in that kind of dialogue and you will pick that up, but don’t assume by default that they don’t want to see A leader who has conviction that they don’t want to have a intellectual dialogue and this kind of friction because they realize that that’s what makes us better.

0:14:06 Ramona Shaw: While I encourage you to try this carefully, the point here is to recognize the potential mental trap presuming senior leaders no more. Okay, now the fourth belief that I want to call out here is when managers believe that good leaders are constantly available, this often masquerades as servant leadership. It’s really a tough one for me because I believe in servant leaders. But more often than not it is misconstrued or misinterpreted as always being available.

0:14:40 Ramona Shaw: You can undermine both your own effectiveness and your team’s growth when you’re always available, when you’re always there to solve problems and answer questions. Organizational psychologists actually call this learned helplessness. Your team becomes dependent on you. Rather than developing their own problem solving capabilities and working with assumption that they can be resourceful, they have a whole team to go to. There’s probably resources online.

0:15:11 Ramona Shaw: There are SOPs, standard operating procedures or their instructions, or there are other people that they can ask or they can Google, or they can simply just try something. So instead of always being available, try setting clear boundaries around your availability. For example, you can be very explicit and say, hey, I have for focused work every day from 2 to 4pm unless something is really urgent, in which case please give me a phone call.

0:15:38 Ramona Shaw: Otherwise I will get back to your questions later in the afternoon. Or even better would be if you add that question to the agenda for our upcoming one on one or our next team meeting. So be explicit with your availability. And for some people it’s hey, I have a block where I’m not available. For other people, it’s to introduce the idea of an office hour. And so they trim all those quick questions and them supporting the team to an hour or two in a day where they’re available for the team.

0:16:08 Ramona Shaw: Other people make it, you know, certain days of the week that they’re available or not available and so forth. When you do, typically your team will only feel like you’re not being present or if you’re being available. If they don’t know and it’s unpredictable, or they can’t check, they’re sort of left in this limbo state. They don’t know when are you going to be available, when are you not? And that prevents them from actually planning their work or their questions in an effective way.

0:16:36 Ramona Shaw: But if they do know and you give them those guardrails, then they can adjust and they will adjust over time. It takes about two weeks for them to get buy into this new behavior or these new patterns. But if I know my boss is going to respond to my Slack message or my email between 4 and 6 o’clock and I have a question at 10am I can start to plan my day and I know I will get an answer in the afternoon. Or there’s an office hour at 2pm That I can dial into if I don’t know if you’re going to be available or if it’s happening or when you come back.

0:17:09 Ramona Shaw: Now I’m sort of like feeling stuck and might not know where to go. So it’s the communication and the predictability. Last but not least, the final mental trap that I want to allude to here is that showing uncertainty or admitting mistakes will undermine your authority. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Studies and organizational behavior consistently show that leaders who demonstrate vulnerability and admit mistakes actually build stronger trust with their teams. When leaders model openness about mistakes or uncertainty creates this transparent environment and other people are also then less afraid to either take risk or admit when things go wrong for them. And you as a leader, you’d want to be aware of that and you have to role model it.

0:17:55 Ramona Shaw: That does not undermine your authority or respect people have for you. It’s actually quite the opposite. So how do you break free from these limiting mental traps? It starts with awareness. Like I said in the beginning, notice when these thoughts come up, challenge them and then ask yourself, is this thought serving me and my team or is this holding me back? Remember, your job as a leader isn’t to be the hero who does everything, knows everything, and never makes a mistake.

0:18:27 Ramona Shaw: Not at all. Your job is to create an environment where your team can do their best work, grow and succeed, sometimes despite you, not because of you. Before we wrap up, I want to mention that we’re launching the Executive Presence Intensive Program in February. It’s four weeks of focused work on developing your executive presence, breaking free from these kind of limiting beliefs and more. We’ll talk about confidence.

0:18:54 Ramona Shaw: We’ll talk about managing your emotions when under pressure and under fire, or when being challenged. We talk about executive communication and much more. Registration opens February 1st. You can find all the details in the show notes. That’s it for today’s episode. If you found this helpful, please share it with other leaders who might be finding themselves with similar mental traps. These are very common and there might be a friend, a colleague, a coworker out there would appreciate hearing this too. And that’s it for today. Until next time, keep showing up as a leader people love to work with.

0:19:29 Ramona Shaw: If you enjoyed this episode, then check out two other awesome resources to help you become a leader people love to work with. This includes a free masterclass on how to successfully lead as a new manager. Check it out@archova.org/ masterclass. The second resource is my best selling book, the Confident and competent New Manager. How to quickly rise to success in your first leadership role. Check it out at archova.org/

0:19:57 Ramona Shaw: books or head on over to Amazon and grab your copy there. You can find all those links in the show notes down below.