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I’m moved through the backstage area, and while I accept that I’ll need to wing it and hope for the best, inside my head, I’m screaming. Adrenaline is pumping, and I’m panicking like never before.
Intro
Welcome to Lead It Better, the podcast made to help you become a more impactful leader.
Whether you have years of experience or just getting started on your leadership journey, you’re in the right place to pick up practical, actionable advice. We’re gonna discuss not only how to best deal with leadership-related questions and situations but explore why a particular approach might work better than others.
My name’s Marton, and for the better part of a decade, I’ve been helping aspiring, new and experienced leaders develop their skills and leadership strategies.
This is episode 2, and this week we’re gonna talk about finding your own voice as a leader, about developing your leadership style and remaining authentic and true to yourself, even when dealing with difficult situations.
Lessons from the Opera
This is something I definitely struggled with.
I remember it was right after Easter that I was scheduled to start my very first team leadership assignment. My predecessor was going on maternity leave and we had a great handover period – six or maybe even eight weeks. While I couldn’t tell you the year from the top of my head, I do remember it was Easter. My wife and I were visiting my in-laws and I had the weirdest dream during our stay.
While I’m hazy about how it all starts, the action picks up as I’m rushed to the opera. Although I cannot sing to save my life, I’m apparently late for my show. And as the concert hall is full – not a single chair left unsold -, I have obviously no choice but to perform. I’m moved through the backstage area, and while I accept that I’ll need to wing it and hope for the best, inside my head, I’m screaming. Adrenaline is pumping, and I’m panicking like never before.
I’m trying to politely resist, explaining to anyone who’ll listen that I know neither the music nor the words. As people push me through the backstage area, I’m pleading and hoping someone will save me because I know neither the music nor the words. By the time we get to the stage, inside my head, I’m rocking back and forth, almost in a catatonic state because – all together now – I know neither the music nor the words. But for whatever reason, by that time, I’m acting all cool and unphased, too ashamed maybe to plead incompetence? I got this, of course. And then I’m pushed through the curtains to the stage. I’m alone… and everyone is looking at me in anticipation. Then – and I don’t know how I know this, I just know that – someone presses ‘play’ on an old cassette player and the music starts. And I try my best to sing along, I guess. I have no idea how, but I’m not booed off stage immediately. Somehow I survive until intermission, and by the time I need to go back to do the second act – because of course there is a second act -, I seem to have gathered some sense of the music and I have a plan about what words to sing.
This is where I woke up panting, waking my wife, and just laughing with relief.
The one thing that hit me as I regained consciousness was that this wasn’t about the opera. But it was about performing, and it was about my voice. The day before I had to go up that leadership stage, I was finally able to verbalize – albeit thanks to a dream – that I had no leadership voice of my own.
Let me explain. When I decided to go into leadership, I’ve had a good few examples around me. Some bad, a lot of good, and a few great ones. I tried to learn from their example: if someone handled a situation really well, I tried to remember what and how they did; if someone reacted badly, I promised myself to do better if I ever got into such a situation.
Don’t get me wrong, I think learning by osmosis is great. But you need to take the moral of the stories, not the exact delivery. That’s not what my brain did. Month after month, when I got in a situation I didn’t know how to handle, I visualized what and how my role models would do. Only problem? It didn’t feel like me.
I was a patchwork of all the leaders I tried to absorb. And I talked with their voices instead of my own.
I didn’t know it back then, but this was one of the areas where my ADHD slowed me down. I’m happy about it now because it pushed me to explore and understand this topic, but man, did I struggle with expressing myself and being confident and comfortable about it. Small things like asking one of my team members to perform a task turned into long minutes of thinking about the best phrasing, so it’s not too bossy but still confident, certainly not too rude but definitely not meek. Just the right balance of kindness and ‘hey, you gotta do this.’ Team meetings and one-on-ones were preceded by hours, sometimes days of prep work.
Funny thing: I don’t think my then-team realized I was struggling with this – at the end of the day, decisions were made, and problems were solved. Add to that, most of my mentees got comfortable with their voices relatively quickly.
So why do I think this topic is essential? Even if you don’t struggle with it like I did?
Because being intentional about your voice is vital to your leadership success.
Don’t do what I did. In my effort to be a good leader, I tried to memorize the correct answers like it was some kind of test. Instead, think about guiding principles because these will enable you to provide confident answers even to questions you’ve never seen before.
The top 3 things you can do
So here are the top 3 things that you can do to find your own voice, and to develop your leadership style:
- explore and understand your values and beliefs,
- decide on your leadership philosophy, and
- communicate for understanding.
1. your values and beliefs
I know, I know, this is the second episode in a row where all we do is introspection with a side order of naval gazing.
What can I tell you? A good house needs a solid foundation, and laying a foundation is certainly less exciting than interior designing your livingroom; I get that. But you know what? Moving around furniture in a room is much more manageable when you don’t have to deal with a shaky foundation.
The same applies to your leadership: your values and beliefs are the basis of your decision-making. To be intentional with your leadership, you need to know what goes on below the surface.
Now, this is a topic where there are no wrong answers. The things you value, that are important to you, and that you stand for are at the core of your personality. So it’s not about making sure that you value the right things – if you’ve listened to episode 1 and have already established that you’re in it for the right reasons, I can’t imagine that your values or beliefs would be disruptive to a team.
The one thing you do need to do is to try and verbalize what they are. Some common examples include honesty, integrity, respect, fairness, empathy, perseverance, responsibility, open-mindedness, compassion, and humility. Some of these may resonate with you.
My top three would be loyalty, respect, and curiosity or open-mindedness.
Suppose you did some naval gazing and are still unsure about your core values. One more thing you could try is to skip ahead and see if you can work backward from your leadership philosophy.
2. Leadership philosophy
Whether you know it or not, you already have a leadership philosophy. You have a human brain, so you’re naturally trying to make decisions in bulk – you do that by using guiding principles. The real question is whether you’re intentional about it. Whether your leadership philosophy, your guiding principles align with what you think your core values are. They might; I’m just asking how certain you are.
So how do you create (or validate) your leadership philosophy?
To get started, you might ask: how would I demonstrate my core values in a team setting? How would my values manifest?
Not even as a leader, necessarily, just in the context of a group. How would you act? What priorities would you have, so people could confidently guess your values based on your behaviours?
If it’s tough to think of anything right now, don’t worry. It’s much easier to figure that one out when you’re actually in a group setting, interacting with others. I assume that right now, you’re only interacting with me, so let me give you a few examples.
As a reminder: my top three values are loyalty, respect, and curiosity.
When it comes to loyalty, I try to express that both on an individual and a team level. To a team member, I would say that while they’re on my team, I’ll help and support them with whatever they need. In some cases, that included me helping them polish up their CV when they decided to leave. Sounds weird, I know, but in return, I could be sure, even without asking, that they’d be supporting the rest of the team and me until their last day with the company. Another thing that some of my teams might have gotten sick of hearing is that we bear our burdens as one team – which I frequently highlighted when an individual was overloaded or needed some time off but they didn’t ask for help. This way, the team knew that our loyalty extended to each other and that the right thing to do was to share the workload and ask for help when needed.
When it comes to respect, I try to ensure that everyone on my team knows that they’re more important as a person than whatever they do as a job. Another thing that I repeat ad nauseum is: health, family, job, hobbies. The number one thing on the list is your own health – if you’re not ok, deal with that while the team bears your burdens for a while, so when you come back, you can do the same for others. Family comes only after health because you need to be all right yourself before you can take care of others. And once you and your family (including pets) are ok, I know you’ll be able to focus on your job. To be honest, I started adding ‘hobbies’ at the end of that list to clarify that not everything is above the job. So. Health, family, job, hobbies – this is one way I demonstrate that I respect you as a person more than the job you do.
Finally, when it comes to curiosity, I try to encourage my teams to be as lazy as possible. If we can simplify it, automate it or in any shape innovate it, let’s do it. I’m a super lazy person. So if there’s a way for me to do something in less time, especially if it’s Excel related, I’ll probably hyperfocus several days on getting that in place. In my experience, if you really lean into this, even the biggest grumblers will soon rephrase their complaints to “could we do something about this?” And that’s the starting point for innovation.
So these are some ways I manifest my values of loyalty, respect, and curiosity in a group setting. Hashtag tell me about your core values without actually telling me your core values. Yeah, I went there.
While you recover from that TikTok reference, the thing I’d like to highlight is that all of the examples I just mentioned tie into the third item on our list: communication. Specifically, communicating for understanding.
3. Communicate for understanding
In the context of finding your own voice as a leader, up until now we were talking about what you want to say. Now we’re gonna focus on how you say it.
Being intentional – seems to be the phrase of the day. And being intentional about your communication is essential, so people perceive you correctly, so they can really hear and understand what you’re actually saying.
I think this is what I struggled with most. In retrospect, I know it was my ADHD interrupting others and jumping on topics and projects out of sheer excitement. Getting misunderstood along the way. Back then, all I knew was that what I said and what was heard by others were two different things.
Independent of your neurological setup, this is the bit that you can and should be working on the most. Yes, your beliefs and leadership style may change over the span of years, but expression of these things is something you’d adjust depending on the person, the team, or the situation.
Some of my mentees interject at this point, asking whether or not it’s manipulative to consciously work on and change the way you talk and behave.
It can be. It’s a tool after all. But it all comes down to your intent, right?
If you want to manipulate people so that they do what’s beneficial for you, then yes, changing your communication can be manipulative. But using communication to express yourself to be understood, and to align what you’re sending out to what people are receiving only adds clarity.
Another thing that can help with clarity is repetition. To continue one of my previous examples, if a team member asked me whether they could get off earlier because they needed to help out a sick family member, I’d say yes and immediately add, “remember: health, family, job, hobbies.” The more I repeated it, the more people knew what to expect. My priorities were clear.
Now, if we’re communicating for understanding, we need to ensure somehow that the understanding bit really happened; checking whether the message landed as intended. Most of the time, and especially for individual discussions, this can be done then and there. But when it comes to your perception by others, which is built over weeks and months, it will require you to watch, listen and ask for some feedback.
I hope you remember: last episode, we talked a bit about psychological safety. Nowhere is it more essential than receiving honest, valuable feedback. That only happens on a regular basis when people feel safe to open up. I think that’s what we should explore next time.
Recap
But to sum up today’s session, we talked about finding your own voice as a leader. We discussed that the foundation of your leadership style consists of your core values. The next layer is how you manifest these ideas in a group setting, how you demonstrate your values. And the fine-tuning on top of that is ensuring that your message and intentions come across clearly. You do that through consistent communication (both verbal and non-verbal) and through open dialogue with your team.
I have good news and bad news.
The good news is that if everything is aligned as we discussed, this shouldn’t take too much effort. A leadership style that is aligned with your values makes life easier for you because you don’t need to do any masking and pretending. You can be true to yourself, authentic and honest about what’s important to you, and lead with conviction and integrity. And if you communicate for understanding, it makes your team’s life easier as well, as they can rely on your consistency.
The bad news is, all that fine-tuning is not done by sitting down and figuring it all out at once. You’ll need to keep coming back to this topic and progressing bit by bit. And even if you feel that you’ve made no progress for weeks, if you remain consistent and intentional about pursuing this, you’ll find that the eventual results are apparent not just within yourself but also in your team.
What’s next?
Ok, so what’s next? Where do we go from here?
We got into the topic of finding your own voice because it is foundational to be conscious and intentional about what effect you have on people as a leader. One of the most impactful topics in this category is your team’s sense of psychological safety.
This is what I’d like to discuss with you next time.
If you’re interested, make sure you hit subscribe and share this episode if you think it would help someone you know.
Thanks for listening; I’m truly grateful for your time and attention.
Talk to you soon.