Trust on Purpose

What kind of leader are you, really?

Charles Feltman and Ila Edgar

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What truly makes a good leader? We dive into this question by challenging ourselves to identify the qualities that matter most – and then getting real about how we're actually doing.

We share some of our own leadership strengths and blind spots, but the conversation quickly evolves into something more interesting: How do you even know if you're leading well? Turns out, your body might have more answers than you think.

We wrestle with some of the trickier aspects of leadership – like how to balance your time and energy across your team, when to make tough calls about people, and why the idea of the all-knowing leader is pretty much a myth.

Leadership isn't something you figure out once or on in solitude. It's an ongoing practice that requires honest self-reflection, building the right support network, and a willingness to call for support when needed. And trust? It's woven into everything; trust in ourselves, in thought partners, in sources of feedback and in the feedback they offer, in our bodies, and our emotions.

We wrap up with a challenge, actually a "Double Dog Dare," that might sound simple but could change how you think about your leadership. Ready to take it on? We'd love to hear what you discover.


We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.

Speaker 1:

Hello, my name is Charles Feltman. Oh, stop my name. Someday we're going to have video versions of this and then all you listening will be able to see what's going on here. My name is Charles Feltman and yeah, and you.

Speaker 2:

And me. My name is Eli Edgar and we're here for another edition of Trust on Purpose, and I think we have an interesting topic to dive into today. I was at a leadership event this week and the facilitator and speaker was Karen Radford, so if you don't follow her, we'll make sure that we tag her in this post. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant work, and what I really loved about the session is she invited us to think about some questions and actually take time to respond and answer them. That even had me thinking about things and gave time for us to in partners to speak about some of these things in a way that I felt was really impactful for both myself as the speaker and then holding space for the listener. Anyway, it was a really lovely exercise and an event, and the one exercise that she started us with, I think, is where we want to dive in today, and so her question was what are 10 things that make you a good leader?

Speaker 2:

And I wrote down a number of things. I don't know that I made it to eight to 10. I think I got to eight, and one of them was being a trustworthy or a trusted leader. So, before we go down that rabbit hole, because I think that's where the juiciness of this conversation will be, charles. What comes to mind for you if you were to say what are the things that make you a good leader? What are some things that make you a good leader? What are some things that come to mind?

Speaker 1:

um, I think, uh, my temperament, which is that I'm pretty even tempered, that um, and, and people value that and respect it, so that I can get away with saying a lot of stuff and it doesn't piss people off, and I am good at taking complex situations or complexity, basically chunking it down and making it seem rational. That's logical, and when it's actually complex, that works well. If we go from complex to or no, complicated yeah sorry, let me start that over again. Let me say this complicated yeah sorry, let me start that over again.

Speaker 2:

Let me say this again Okay, chad, chad, this is your cue, my love.

Speaker 1:

So, if it's, I can take complicated material data, a situation that's complicated, and chunk it down in a way that people can understand it and follow it. So that makes me able to, you know, motivate people to move forward. I guess in that kind of condition, if it's complex, it's a little more challenging. But even then, my ability to explain, to take complex or complicated situations and distill them down into something that I can understand and therefore other people hopefully can understand Some areas. Other trust I do a pretty good job of building trust as a leader. I do a pretty good job of building trust as a leader.

Speaker 1:

I am good at I guess I'm good at servant leadership. In that sense, I'm not the out front. Okay, this is exactly what we're going to do. You follow me and back me up and charge, but rather helping other people take charge of their own piece of whatever it is that we're doing together and really giving them not only the tools to do that but the motivation to do that. Those are some things I guess I'd come up with. I'm going to stop there. That's not a full list of 10.

Speaker 1:

a full list of 10 by any means, but I love to. This is something, too, that I would love to talk to somebody you know, talk to some other people about, and get their feedback on what they see as qualities that make me a good leader.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love, I love that idea. So I went back to my list. So, trusted or trustworthy, I think I'm kind, I'm generous, I'm very human. I think I am quite vulnerable in my humanness. I think a couple of the other things for me. I love to create the vision, or I'm often in idea mode and I love to have people come along with me but use your own creativity to get there. Um, so I I think those are some, some things that come to mind for me.

Speaker 2:

I've wrote down here emotional, but I don't. I don't mean like I'm an emotional wreck, I'm not a, I'm not a dumpster fire. I think what I am able to do is display and express emotion in a way that normalizes it and makes it a bit more accessible. So it was interesting in going through this exercise and then, of course, karen had a follow-up question, and the follow-up question is like so now you know, look at your list, and so how are you doing with these, how are you actually doing with these? And so I think this is where the juiciness of our conversation will come today, and that it's really lovely to take the time to write these things down as where we think we're good as a leader or strong as a leader, but then how are we actually bringing these to life? What are we actually doing on a day-to-day basis? And so, yeah, I want to stop there and let you jump in.

Speaker 1:

You mean, you want me to tell you how I'm actually doing with this stuff?

Speaker 2:

Or what comes to mind to you when I say it, so like, how are you actually doing and what do you perceive that if you were in?

Speaker 1:

front of a coaching client having this conversation. What do you think people would say? How are you dealing with this?

Speaker 2:

If I were in front of a coaching client.

Speaker 1:

I'm sorry. How am I doing as a coach, Because that's a little different than being a leader.

Speaker 2:

Sorry. Okay, chad, scrap that, scrap that. Let's go back to as you think about your own list and how you're doing as Charles how do you think you're doing?

Speaker 1:

How are?

Speaker 2:

you bringing.

Speaker 1:

Powered by bringing leadership or trust, or I mean trust. I can talk about a lot because I do think about it a lot. I think about how I'm doing at building trust with other people individually, how I'm doing at creating a context in which other people can build trust with each other. Those are the two kind of key things that I think are important in being a good trust builder, and I think I'm doing pretty good. There are places where I see that I fall down, that I lose trust. I lose trust sometimes by going down rabbit holes. You know where I'll be going along talking about something and then I'll go off on some rabbit hole that is not totally relevant and I lose people and I think I lose a little bit of their trust. I also think that I could do better by bringing more energy into, especially if I'm leading a workshop and I'll talk about it in that context leading a workshop.

Speaker 1:

I think all of those things I talked about before are valid and, in particular, building trust. Especially if I'm doing a workshop around trust is really important. To be trusted by the people who are in the is really important to be trusted by the people who are in the where the participants in the workshop. So I think I'm doing. If I were to grade myself on a scale of 1 to 10, I'd probably grade myself at about a 7.5 at that. There are places where I could do better and there are places that I you know, places I do pretty well. So and I think this is great I mean I can, as I'm thinking and talking, I can see where there I can articulate the places that I think I'm doing well and the places that I could in fact do better. But I'm going to train it back to you and see where you you know where you're going with this.

Speaker 2:

So I have two things, two separate train tracks in my brain right now, and one is this term do better. And I just finished grading three different assignments times 24 participants in a two-day course that I led a couple of weeks ago on leader as coach, and so part of this reflection was as a leader, where do you want to improve? What do you want to continue to develop? And I see this term I want to do better, I want to ask better questions. I want to do better. I want to ask better questions, I want to be better at patience, I want to.

Speaker 2:

So all of these things which I think make sense when we're writing them or saying them, but again, what do they actually mean? How do you know? What is it going to take to do better and how do you know when you've reached do better? So that's one tangent that I'm on. The other train track is taking me down. What is the intersection between? I've been reading a little bit about how self-awareness is the new superpower for the 21st century, but in self-awareness we still only see what we bring to ourselves or we notice ourselves. And so where's the intersection between, if we want to be a good leader, the self-awareness to notice and have these conversations and, as you're saying, noticings about where you are trustworthy and where you are trustworthy and where you could make some improvements or changes and feedback.

Speaker 1:

I think feedback is really useful and critical. Actually, how else am I going to? Going back to the Johari window? That's how we find out about what others see that we don't for sure more trustworthy in situations, be a better leader of a workshop or a better leader of a group of people trying to achieve something. So feedback is really critical.

Speaker 1:

I think I can only go so far, just sort of cross-examining my own mind, sort of cross-examining my own mind. I think that I'm going to go off on a little bit of a tangent here myself, but I think that our bodies have a lot to tell us that we don't pay attention to sometimes. So if I think about how my think, about if I feel into and let myself experience, in a way, what my body is, the feedback my body is giving me at any given moment, and if I'm at the end of a day of running a workshop, go back and kind of go through that. I think there's a lot of data, if you will, there that would be useful for me in terms of looking at what I'm doing well and what I could do differently that might have greater impact. I'll hope.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, this is really interesting and I'm hoping, hoping, and I know that you will stay here a little bit longer, because I think that I have the same. I know that I have the same source of data. I do also have a body. Body has given you as a form of data that was helpful for you to learn something for yourself. Whether it was in facilitation or coaching or whatever.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I'll talk about a situation that came up while I was leading a workshop not terribly long ago. During the workshop, someone asked a question, then someone else responded, sort of reacted to the question, and in that moment I noticed that my breath got really high in my chest, which tells me that I was kind of getting close to my own little amygdala amygdala hijack there, that I wasn't paying attention outside, not really paying attention to the room so much as there was something going on internally that was trying to work itself out. What I was able to do in that moment was start breathing deeper into my body, breathing into my belly, shifting that so that I was able to bring my attention back out to the room and what was happening in the room before it got too far off on a tangent. That wasn't going to be useful for, at least in my opinion, for the people who were there. But that's a way that my body tells me things in that respect. Other times I'll find that the way I'm standing or sitting, if I'm coaching, for example and of course I'm doing it in front of a screen 98% of the time but if I find that I'm really kind of clenched and tight, that's telling me that there's something going on about how I am in the conversation. That is not serving me and it's, I'm sure, not serving my client. It's not serving me as a coach and it's not serving them in their journey and their exploration. And so two things can happen. One is I can intervene then when I'm aware of it, but also I can take it back and go what's going on?

Speaker 1:

For example, recently I have a client who's just blilly in his head. He analyzes everything to death, and because that's where I come from, that's kind of my lineage is let's think about this, let's analyze it, and I love to come from. That's kind of my lineage is let's think about this, let's analyze it, and I love to do that. That's not coaching. That doesn't help me as a coach. It doesn't help my client.

Speaker 1:

As a person who has come to coaching for a reason, I have to really work hard, and I find myself tightening up when I hear him doing that and I'm having to kind of bite my tongue and not jump into the analysis myself, right, like, oh, I want to just jump in and start analyzing this, just like he is, because, hey, I'm really good at that too and instead actually step back and intervene in what's going on for him and break that pattern a little bit so that he can step back and have a wider perspective on himself. So again, cues for my body are what I end up relying on. It's amazing I wouldn't have said this 10 years ago or 15 years ago. I would have said I don't know what I've said, but that's what I've found is my most reliable recorder of that, and isn't that fascinating?

Speaker 2:

Because I'm again coming back to this list of 10 things that I think make me a good leader, and how many of these actually I feel in my body, and my body gives me wisdom and data about them as a way to check in, validate. You know, data is helpful. It's not good or bad or right or wrong, it's just simply data. If I come back to what am I actually doing as a leader, so how am I building self-awareness in? How am I actually listening to what my body is telling me? How am I looking for and asking for feedback to help me tweak or align, to make sure that how I think I'm being perceived or assessed is actually accurate, and what adjustments do I need to make there? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

So how do you do that? How do I do that? Yeah Well, there's a couple things is, I do pay attention to my body a lot, and so, even as I'm facilitating, I am not analytical. I don't want to get into the analyzing like you. Like I was laughing, not because I was laughing at you, but it's like that's the furthest thing that I would ever do, like that's just a no.

Speaker 1:

I knew you weren't laughing at me.

Speaker 2:

That's just a no. I can get absorbed and really into the dynamics of a room and I know that I have potentially lost my own personal grounding when I don't know where my feet are. And so, quite literally, I will lose my feet and I may be standing in front of the classroom of 24 students, as I was a couple of weeks ago, and notice that either I don't know how I got to where I am or that if I just pause for a second, I'm like, oh yeah, I don't know where my feet are and of course, they're still attached to my body, they haven't wandered off on their own.

Speaker 2:

They're still attached, but it's a cue for me to bring myself actually back to the room and current present, and as an instructor, in that particular context, my role isn't to be in coach mode, my role isn't to be in facilitation mode. I'm an instructor, and so I need to be paying attention to what's happening in the room. Are all voices being heard? Are we hearing from participants? Are my instructions clear? So for me to lose my presence in the room is not necessarily helpful to my students, and so that might be one thing that I notice, or, if I so, another one of my values is learning.

Speaker 2:

Like I'd love you, and I have this giggle over the many books that we have behind us, the constant I have to go to the library this afternoon because there's more books waiting for me, and so I know that I also I need to shift my awareness if I get into too much.

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, and this book says this, and this book says this, and this is another good book and this is another book. So I connected with my value of learning, but not in a way that supports what's happening in front of me, and so that's a slippery edge for me, because I like to show like my little ego self sometimes like hey, look it, she's well-read, she knows a couple of things, but that's actually very unfair and unkind in the context of what I'm there to be doing. So those are just little things that I can notice, and if we don't pause or have a practice of being able to notice these things and, of course, when we're beginners and starting to pay attention to the data from our body it's really easy for many of us to miss. I think both you and I probably lived from the neck up for many, many years and then started the practice of how do I live in this full body and take advantage of all of the data that it's telling me?

Speaker 1:

You know that's interesting what you just said that we've lived from the neck up for many years and my first thought was that didn't start until I was a teenager. Actually, until I was a late teenager, I was living a lot from, you know, the neck down maybe, but I was very physical as a kid, especially around water, swimming and then later surfing. So there was that physicality that I loved, but I left that behind. You're right, I did then sort of shift and left that behind when I started working in organizations where I wasn't supposed to, my body wasn't relevant.

Speaker 2:

No.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

It was a mode of transportation from this meeting to that meeting.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

That's all. That's all it really was. Yeah, and the annoying part of, like you know, having to eat and stuff like that Like, oh, I have to feed you again.

Speaker 1:

Really, so I'd love to. For you, it's your feet that help you kind of notice what's going on. For me, it's my breath. Where is my breath? Is it calm and relaxed and low, or is it high and shallow? That tells me a lot about what's going on in any of the areas, I think, relating to leadership and how I'm leading a group, how I'm leading a workshop, how I'm coaching and even how I'm leading a team. If we're about to put a workshop on and there's more than one of us, more than me, how am I leading that team? And that's actually, for me, the closest thing I come to leadership in the traditional sense of leading a group or leading a team is when I'm working with a team of people to put something together and put it on. In that respect, whether it's a workshop or a series or workshops or whatever, May I ask this question?

Speaker 1:

I don't know. I'll tell you when you ask it.

Speaker 2:

And so when you're about to work with a group in order to facilitate X for client, do you personally have a practice where you're thinking about your own leadership impact, what you need and want from this group of people and how you can best serve them?

Speaker 1:

Absolutely yes. Yeah for the part of the group, but I lost someone else along the line by not paying attention to that person's needs. So I was paying attention to the whole group and not paying attention to one person who was in a different place, and that was a problem for that person and ultimately for the whole group. So that was a lesson for me and I recognized that I needed to be able to widen my view to really see everyone and where they're at and address situations that might be brewing that I wasn't aware of, when I'm paying attention more to the people who are kind of following my lead, if you will.

Speaker 2:

This is reminding me. Thank you for answering that. I appreciate that. It's reminding me of a conversation I was having with a potential client yesterday and how something that they're potentially implementing is really focused on their lower, lower performers I'm using air quotes, lower performers and kind of medium performers and not necessarily top performers, because they don't really need it and I'm describing this quite loosely. It wasn't described in this way, but as a quick description.

Speaker 1:

Gotcha, is this your interpretation?

Speaker 2:

This is your interpretation, this is my interpretation, this is my quick and dirty which I think actually happens for many of us when we're in a leadership role and that we may focus on the 80% and we may have a 10% on either end that we miss or that we don't give as much attention to either, because they're doing great on their own, they don't really need anything, but actually they do, and actually it's unfair and unkind and un-leadership-like to not also take care of their needs, whatever they might be. And then I would also say to those that are like really struggling and having a really really hard time it can be the story that, well, I don't have time to take care of that because I have a bigger team. And so I'm wondering again, in this messiness of what does it take to be a good leader and how are we holding that and navigating it and bumping into it every single day? There's a lot for us to hold.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and what you just described, the sort of bottom 10% or however many people that might represent. That's kind of a both strategic and philosophical question, or values question for a leader. Do I, given I only have so much time, I only have so much time how much of it do I allocate for that person, and when do I say that I'm no longer willing to allocate that much time? If I say yes, I'm going to, I am going to allocate some time and I help bring them up, is there a point at which I say you know what? I'm not going to do that anymore, because the rest of the team, the team that are doing either reasonably well or really well, they're actually doing what needs to be done, but they need my guidance, my support, my, whatever, my ability to remove the roadblocks for them is all being taken up by this person.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's a challenge for any leader, and I've been there. I've been there and it's hard. It's a challenge for any leader, and I've been there, I've been there and it's hard. I've made the mistake of well, I wouldn't say mistake, but I definitely have spent too much time with the person who was struggling, and I've also not spent enough time, I think in one case with a person who was struggling and just let them fail which was not fair either, or well done I might have actually saved that person and moved them up into the ranks of doing okay yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I would say that absolutely has happened to me in a leadership role and would still be a really, really, really hard spot for me, because my inclination would be to keep trying and to keep supporting and that generosity would keep coming right and acknowledging their humanness. And they're just really struggling right now and and and and yeah yeah, that would be a tough one for me.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it is. And the first time I did actually cut someone it was really hard because it was someone I actually liked personally and it was really hard and I definitely would say it was the right thing to have done. The right thing to do then and, looking back on, it was the right thing to do for the rest of the team, for the sake of all of us and that person too, because they needed to know that that was not the right place for them, not the right role for them.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, this also is encouraging me to remember that, as a leader, we don't have to figure this stuff out all on our own. And I think, if I look back at when I was in that situation I think I had a team of 10 reporting to me. I very much felt alone and I very much felt that I had to figure it out on my own, and yet I could see that what I was doing and the approach that I was using it wasn't working. It wasn't working. I didn't want to speak to and I actually worked. This is a time when I worked in HR, so in recruitment, I didn't want to speak to and I actually worked.

Speaker 2:

This is a time when I worked in HR, so in recruitment, I didn't want to talk to HR because I didn't want to formalize it. It didn't feel like a place that I could go for thought leader, like help me, be a thought partner with me. I didn't feel like I had other peers or colleagues that could thought partner with me and hold the confidentiality, and that was really, really heavy. Yeah, as I think again, what makes a good leader is also having a relationship where you can lean into, whether it's peers or colleagues or HR or someone to say I need someone to thought partner. Here's the situation. I'm only seeing this one perspective. Help me see something else.

Speaker 1:

Yes, I think that's a skill and a behavior of good leadership, someone who's a good leader. I haven't led in an organizational context, but, again, leading groups of people who are doing a program, running a program, presenting it, or what's the word Develop and deliver, deliver Okay, delivering a program, yes, program, presenting it, or what's the word Develop and deliver, deliver Okay.

Speaker 1:

Delivering a program, yes, Leading a team of people that are delivering a program Well, actually first developing and then delivering it. It's equally important there to be able to. You know, perhaps someone I could go to and say, hey, this isn't working, Help.

Speaker 2:

Help.

Speaker 1:

Help, help, yeah, isn't working. Help, help, help, help, yeah. I'm thinking about this in general too. Having kind of an advisory group of people that I know well that I feel comfortable with, that I can kind of, you know, go to individually or call them as a group and say, hey, I could use your help with this, and I think that's something that leaders, leaders don't do enough of. How many leaders have I coached who feel like they're kind of alone in this sort of situation and then they value coaching for that, and they probably wouldn't need coaching as much if they had that kind of relationship with at least one other, if not two or three other people in their organization or around them in some way.

Speaker 2:

Might be somebody that they used to work with in another company or whatever. Yeah, I'm actually thinking back to one of the questions in the assignments that I just graded was around that and thinking that, as a leader, the expectation was to have all the right answers Right and to solve all the problems, and it's like that's exhausting and it's physically impossible. We can't possibly. We can't possibly know everything about everything and we're not supposed to. Yeah, and it's taking me back to that Simon Sinek quote about how leadership isn't about being in charge, it's about taking care of the people in your charge.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's a good quote.

Speaker 2:

Again, as we're developing our own leadership skills, our competencies as a leader, whatever unique, magic, secret sauce that that is. How are we being intentional about developing those competencies? How are we checking with ourselves, paying attention to all of our data sources, not just our brain, but our body, relying on peers and colleagues to be trusted as thought partners and as support when needed? Leadership isn't something to step into lightly. Yeah, I feel like saying it's a full body sport. Yeah, I feel like saying it's a full body sport, yeah.

Speaker 1:

And again going back to trust, I think trust it weaves throughout all of this, all of leadership, trusting ourselves, finding trusted partners to be able to bring stuff to, trusting feedback, finding trusted sources of feedback and then actually acting on that feedback. Trusting our input, other input sources, our body, our emotions. When an emotion shows up, it's another source of data. It's not necessarily just random. There's a reason that suddenly I feel really whatever, and so interrogate that and see what's going on underneath it. But trust that I can do that.

Speaker 2:

Trust that it's worth the time. I have a yeah, actually I was going to say a challenge. No, it's a double dog dare. It's a double dog dare to our listeners is to actually spend some time and think about, maybe even make a list of, what are the 10 things that you feel make you a good leader. And then how are you actually doing? Where could you dial up? How could you do that? I would love to hear if any of you actually do this exercise for yourself and would like to share. I'd be delighted. Charles would be delighted to hear as well.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely.

Speaker 2:

We're here to support you.

Speaker 1:

We'd love to hear from you what is it that you do in? Let's say, you say I'm really good at listening to the people that work for me, that I'm leading, so what is it that makes you good at that? How do you do that in a way that you would say is good and that you think other people would say, yeah, he's a really good listener and I like that as part of his leadership, or her leadership?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, love it, I love it. Well this has been a very interesting conversation, well, as our conversation before the conversation was like, yeah, I think we should go here, but we never really know where it's going to go.

Speaker 1:

Right, yes, it's just like those community of practice calls for the people who have been to the Trust to Work certification program. There's a topic and I always think okay, this topic, you know it might go somewhere, I don't know. See where it goes, and at the end of the hour we're still going. Okay, and there's more, and there's more, and there's more. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we need more time. We're not done yet.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, not done. Anyway, I love it and thank you very much for another really interesting and worthwhile, I think, conversation about this, about another piece of trust and another piece of leadership and how they go together.

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker 1:

Thank you too, Until next time.

Speaker 2:

Until next time. I can't find my stop button.

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