J: Let’s do this thing. Welcome to Slingshot2’s5 Shotcast. A series of bite-sized podcasts that will feel like an espresso shot to your brain. I’m Jackie. I’m Courtney. Something we’ve been thinking about is this counterintuitiveness of leadership strength. Ooh, that was, that was like a mouthful.
C: Oh, you said a lot.
J: It sounds very highbrow, doesn’t it?
C: Oh, not for long. Never long. Highbrow with us.
J: So, what are we, get us started on this, on this topic, Courtney, what are we thinking about that?
C: Well, we’ve been thinking a lot about it because so much of what we teach is that we ask people to do things that feel like weakness, and it’s actually where their leadership strength lies.
So one of them is, it comes up with. We do it all the time in coaching, right? Where people have an issue, or they have a problem and, our first thing is not to jump in and solve their problem and fix everything because that’s what strong people do. But to pause, acknowledge, and validate that we don’t solve, we step back, and every part of us, with our collective wisdom, education, experience, and training, says no, strong people help, right?
Strong people help. Get me in there. Fix it. No, the best thing you can do right now is to. Smile and nod and listen and be counterintuitive.
J: Yeah. There’s a lot of counterintuitiveness to leading. Um, one that was coming up for me as you were talking about that is, um, someone who is whining.
An employee who is whining about something, your instinct as a leader, and you might even think that this is a good thing to do is to tell them to stop their whining.
C: Absolutely.
J: Because nobody really likes a whiner, and that’s true. I mean, whining in itself is what Seth Godin once called empty commentary where no action is possible. He’s right. And whining is not particularly helpful, but when you’re a leader, you have to be cautious about telling someone to stop whining.
Because by doing that, you, I picture this as like you’ve just tried to, you know, stuff something down. Like just, you know, just to put something down. And I won’t, I won’t be hearing any of that. When maybe the more counterintuitive, Less instinctual thing to do is to actually listen to it for a minute, not indefinitely, not, not, you know, we don’t have to have unlimited patience with whining, but to initially just listen to it.
C: Yeah, and it, this, I see this all the time in the change space because change events create loss for people, and those losses create pain, pain of disappointment, pain of anger, pain of resentment, pain, whatever. And we want to help we want to be strong. We want to point people in direction. So we say oh, Get on with it.
Get back to work. Let me tell you how I’d handle that, like all these things. Remind them where the high road is like, you know, and it’s not comfortable to look at our decisions all the time and take full responsibility for, yeah, we’re getting something good, but something was lost in the process. And human beings, this is the part where you have to embrace the counterintuitiveness.
You have to lean into the curve. The other direction is if you don’t listen to the whining, if you don’t create space for people to process whatever emotions are coming up because they have lost something, you are going to make it worse for people who don’t have someone who sees them, who cares about them, who lets that be, and who is fully empathic.
You don’t have to agree with it You don’t have to endorse it. Just see that person in whatever state they’re in. That’s it’s surprising. It’s powerful. But that’s indeed the only place freedom comes from.
J: That’s actually true. And it is so hard though, to sort of, you know, sit on our hands as we say, like sit on your hands, but it turns out that, um, a couple of things, uh, number one, your judgment is not needed here.
Leaders do need to judge a lot of things. They need to judge performance at the end of the day. They have to say, you know, who’s performing to expectations and who’s not. So judgment is there, but when it comes to just. You know, how, what someone is struggling with, the emotions that they’re having, feelings that they’re having, your judgment is not needed here.
What’s needed here is just to allow yourself to be curious about how the other person is thinking and feeling. And you’re going to get clues about that by listening to what they have to say. Even if it’s not particularly helpful, like it is this sort of empty commentary, so be it for now. So be it.
Just listen. Acknowledge and validate what’s going on behind that whining and what’s going on for that person so that you can now start to form a connection. You can start to see that person, and they feel seen, which will help you move things forward, which is what you’re trying to do. But when you push back with no whining, here’s my judgment, here’s my advice, you know what you should do, you have stalled the forward progress of that conversation.
C: And I’m going to throw in just a bonus thing, and this is a way bigger topic than we can cover on this call, but Harriet Lerner does a ton of work around apologizing, and it’s kind of an If you want to, you can use it as a bellwether of how willing you are to create space for other people when you are willing to apologize, it is the most strong Ownership place you can come in from and if you are having an energy like would I apologize for this and then you watch yourself? Buckle embrace and be unwilling to be vulnerable and take accountability in that space It’s actually probably this little nose to yourself that you have some work to do It’s it’s I remember the first time she said that like strong people apologize. I might I’ll tell you my inner dialogue was I got work to do, right and so that just learning like am I willing to be in a space with people?
That’s what strong leaders do.
J: Ooh, I love this. Oh, there’s a lot more to say about this, I’m sure, but that’s all for this episode of our Shotcast. And we always do have a lot more to say, so if you want more, uh, please drop us a line at Slingshot25.com. Until next time.