3 helpful tips for leading leaders

Tiffany Sauder: We just started Kyler Mason's takeover on the Scared Confident Feed. If you did not hear that episode, it's the one right before this one. Please go listen to that. He's really peeling back the layers on his journey of becoming the president of Element Three, but really wrestling also through a big thing in his life, which is, anxiety that can really take hold.

So in between these three episodes of Kyler that are dropping, I am gonna be sharing kind of an echo, of. A lesson or an experience that I think is relevant in, his story that's gonna be shared over the next few weeks. So the one today I want to explore is leading leaders.

It's a totally different thing to realize that you're leading not just an amazing person, but somebody who you realize is gonna lead people someday as well. And it was really evident. Early in Kyler and i's relationship that I knew he was gonna lead someday. It was of kind of an imperative that he had placed on his life and I knew that that was gonna be something I was gonna have to help make true for him if he was gonna stay here for sure.

But also I knew to serve his career well. I needed to make sure that that was part of how I was speaking into him as we were growing and working together.

So there's three things as I think about leading leaders One is, do we have to like nurture their potential and then we have to empower their growth.

So I'm gonna break that down a little bit. The idea of potential getting to the place where anybody on your team will share with you what their goals and dreams are. It's like a really vulnerable moment for them to say, Hey, I want to lead a company someday. I want to go run a huge division at a Fortune 500 company.

I wanna run a private equity backed organization. I want, to run an international team. I, may have goals that they know that, you know, that that goal is not possible inside of your organization. And sharing that is a really vulnerable moment when. They realize they may share something with you that begins to tip their hat that they're not gonna work for you for the rest of time.

And I think that's really healthy. I think that's really important. I think that's such a critical part of us as people whose careers are in our care. That we know exactly what it is that they want and where it is that they're going, and that we hold that open-handed in such a way that the right thing for them will be the right thing for us.

And building that trust is really important. I think about myself as a shared caretaker when those goals are shared with me. Kyler specifically, I knew he was gonna run a company. I knew that it would probably be a small company. meaning it probably wouldn't be publicly traded

um, I knew that he likes privately held companies. I knew that he liked things he could keep his arms around. I knew that he'd probably work for a place where he was able to build the team. All of those things I knew. And so, As a leader of leaders knowing their dreams and creating an environment where they can say the entirety of that dream, even if some of that might be out of the sandbox of your.

Company and the specific opportunities that you can bring to them is a critical piece to making sure that what you're giving them to learn, your motivations and their aspirations are totally aligned. I think that's a really key piece.

Another one Is if they're gonna be a leader of leaders. I believe this with my whole stinking being, is that the more you know yourself, the more authentic you are with yourself, the better you understand yourself, the more you understand your motivations, your ambition, all of those things, the better leader you will be.

Because you are not manipulating who you are in any way, which means you can be fully present to see, accept and understand where other people are. So if you are building a leader of people, you have to help them on their journey of understanding who they are. And for me at least, if they're not willing to do that, I don't know how to help them.

Because leading people is not a mechanical exercise. Yes, there are leadership principles. Yes, there are things that we can lean on, like communication best practices, but it is about relationships and it is about trust. And when you're willing to reveal who you are to help other people know how to work with you, to say, Hey, this is how you're gonna get the best out of me.

How can I get the best out of you? When you have that kind of language and that kind of self-awareness, it breeds that in the people around you. So Kyler will use him as our example because he's on the show right now helping him. Get to the place where he was even able to talk about his anxiety or talk about some of the things that he was dealing with more privately was a really big part of Him, bringing his authentic self to the organization.

When anxiety would take over his body, we could see it. We were participating in it because we could see it and we knew it was happening. But he wasn't yet to the place where he could say, Hey, this is what's happening. Let me bring you in on this. And so you felt like you were kind of standing on the outside and not sure what to say or if he knew, or does he know that I know.

That kind of thing. And as he's gotten more confidence stepping into saying like, Hey, this is what happens to my body. This is the way that I cope with this. This is the way that we continue to move forward and this isn't a thing for me, or I've learned how to manage it. The exercise of knowing himself has made him so much more of a trusted leader in our organization has only sped up the velocity where other people reveal their true selves to him.

And that connection and understanding and willingness to sort of fight for the team is only gonna create more velocity in the business. So it starts with you. It starts with us. And so if we are a leader of leaders, we have got to teach our people. We've gotta create ways where they learn who they are.

And I'm a huge proponent of things like the Enneagram and the DISC profile and strengths finders. All of those are really helpful tools to begin to get an understanding of who you are and how you operate and why you show up in the world that way.

The last thing in like leading leaders, and there's like probably whole books written on this, but these are the things top of mind for me right now, um, is

balancing being available with letting them find their own way. Like there are times when you're leading leaders, you have got to give them the confidence that they can solve hard problems.

That is ultimately what leadership is about. Being able to take issues, dissect 'em down into their components, activate the right people and resources against it, and solve problems over and over so that when big things happen, you aren't freaked out cuz you're like, you know what? I'm a problem solver.

This is just a problem. I know what to do with problems. This isn't freaked me out. I know exactly what to do. you have to create an environment where leaders. See themselves as confident and competent solvers. And if you are always there helping, telling, pointing, managing, directing, they will never create the confidence that they have the competence to solve problems.

Which means sometimes you just have to like sit there and say, I see you. I hear you. I know you're in the middle of it. And you might know the answer, but you have to shut up and say, you're gonna get there. You're gonna get to the other side. You're gonna get through this. I know you are, you've thought of all the things.

Keep going. But knowing when to get involved and to help and knowing when to stay on the sidelines or just ask questions and lightly direct, is like an art form that I'm still learning, but that is a critical part of leading a leader. They have to feel the ownership. They have to feel the gravity of what they're working on.

They have to feel, I think the edge of fear of like, here we go. Holy crap. Are you sure? Cuz that builds so much confidence in their ability to solve. And that is the most critical gift I believe, that we can give any leader is the confidence that they can solve any problem. Or have the tools to solve any problem.

So those are, my top mind things. Leading leaders is a totally different ballgame. I've said this on the podcast, I think maybe in the first 17 years, episodes that we did where we walked back through kinda how we built the agency, but Kyler was. My first evidence that I was not just a leader of people, but that I could lead leaders is a different practice staying ahead of them, giving them hard enough problems, asking them hard enough questions, being able to be interrogated by somebody who you know wants.

To be excellent and wants to lead and wants to grow, really pushed me in my own growth journey. So bring those people close. I'll take a thousand of them beside me, I, I love the energy, the excitement, the dreaming, the passion, the pushing that comes when you're leading a group of leaders. And I hope that this has helped you a little bit inspire the way that you think about the way that you lead the people who will lead the people in your organization.

Thanks for listening today.

‍