Camille Rapacz: How good are you at leading others? And how would you know? Leadership is about more than having a team of people to lead. And we say this all the time on this podcast, however, leadership is about how we lead others. So as much as it's about your approach and your actions and leadership being a choice, the essence of leadership is really in leading others.
So today we're going to talk about this and how you would assess your leadership skills in leading people, whether that's a team, a community, or an individual.
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful business.
I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
Camille Rapacz: Hello, George. Hi, Camille. Are you ready for some more talk about reflection? I'm
George Drapeau: always ready for more talk about reflection.
Camille Rapacz: You don't think we're at risk of overly reflecting on reflection?
George Drapeau: Uh, not for us. Maybe for the
Camille Rapacz: audience. Not for us. Yeah, it's true. I mean, I feel like we can't overemphasize enough of the importance of reflection.
So, you know, if you're tired of hearing of this, sorry, audience, no, sorry, not sorry, I guess is what I'm going to say, because it's really important, I mean, let's face it. It's, going to be more enjoyable to talk about all the fun potential future plans and activities we want to do. I for one love planning, but that's because there's no risk in that.
Like I get to just plan things a little less enjoyable to look back and reflect on how things went because suddenly I start bringing in things like judgment and all that kind of stuff. Hmm. Interesting. Because nothing really goes the way we ideally want it to go.
So we're always looking back with some disappointment, like, ah, this didn't happen, or I wish that had happened and this didn't happen. So you know, we're always kind of having to overcome that.
George Drapeau: With this podcast is the belief shift. You've laid out eight excellent premises, eight principles, belief shifts.
As we've talked about many times, reflection is an underlying permeating skill that you need to develop. It's not a belief shift. It's a skill that can help you with really all the others. I think, right. And I think that's why we keep coming back to it.
Camille Rapacz: It is. I think it's it is an underlying skill.
And I think it again, because most of us don't naturally go there don't naturally prioritize reflecting and assessing what happened in the past before we start planning for the future. That's why I keep coming back to it. So yeah, I think we need help in making sure that this is part of our regular activities.
So we're going to keep doing it. Hopefully it makes you listen to the podcast more.
George Drapeau: You really took that to a place I didn't expect you were going. I know. Do not exit the podcast, people. Don't exit. It's only going to get better from here.
Camille Rapacz: We're going to make reflection fun. Today we're going to talk about reflecting on, well, let me just say the last episode, the episode prior to this one, episode 67, we talked about reflection in terms of leading of yourself. So self leadership. And we went through a set of questions for that because that's level one of leadership.
Leadership being a choice being, a set of actions. There's this idea of self leadership. So if you didn't listen to that episode, go back and check that one out because that's fundamental to being a good leader.
This level today, we're going to talk about leadership of others, kind of the essence of leadership. The whole reason of being a good leader is, is also about leading others. So when we talk about that, as we did in the last episode, we're going to go through a list of questions, reflection questions that you can use to assess your leadership skills in terms of leading others.
So, George, I know you have a good size team that's reporting to you. So what I can't wait to hear from you is how valuable you find any one of these questions. Maybe there's certain questions that stand out for you in this process. So I have some curiosities for you that I'll, I'll ask you about as we go through this process.
But just having you sort of provide your input in terms of as a leader of a team, how would this would help you? Or you also, I might get to the end of this list because as you know, I'm always have a longer list and I had to shorten it. So I'll be curious if there's something really important you think is missing from my list that we might need to add.
George Drapeau: I can tell you already, I'm not going to find anything important that's missing from the list. I think it's great. But sure.
Camille Rapacz: I mean, it's happened. It's happened. It's happened.
George Drapeau: It has happened. I want to do a little spoiler alert here for the audience and say, I mean, the audience knows that have notes.
We're not going completely off script. And so I've looked at this and I've looked at the list and I think it's a fantastic list. I'm really looking forward to going through it with you. The thought that came to me, Camille was, I at least implicitly think about every one of these when I take on a new job or inherit a new team or something.
I don't have a printed checklist of what are my Attributes because I've been managing for a billion years and I've got to kind of be ingrained in the muscle memory. But what occurred to me was or somebody else could take this list and use this as like a self onboarding list to new group, give you an example.
I started with the new group and people create their 30, 60, 90 day plans. One of the things I could have done was say, take these questions before I started to decide which of these attributes are not so important, medium important, highly important to me.
And then go into my new group with that armed and say, okay, I'm really going to emphasize communication D E I goal setting. Those are the main things I focus on.
Am I making sense? Is this what you're going to say at the end of the podcast anyway?
Camille Rapacz: Yes. And we're done. Thanks everybody.
George Drapeau: A new situation checklists?
Camille Rapacz: Actually, I think that's fantastic. See, I knew you'd have something new to add into the conversation. Yes, I think it's a great tool as you're a leader of a team to continually use this as a way to assess how well you're doing and improve on your leadership skills.
But if you've been thrown into a, now I'm managing a new team, I'm in a new job. I got a new situation. It is great for onboarding yourself into that. Like, okay, now I need to reestablish this because I have a new team. Reflection.
George Drapeau: Reflection. Re reflection.
Camille Rapacz: Oh, pre reflection. Oh no. We're going to coin our own new TM trademarked.
Nobody take that. We have it. pre-flection. Yeah.
George Drapeau: Okay. I'm sorry. I had a serious comment. I let myself go off the rails, but I'm ready to get serious again. I just think it's a great checklist. Looking forward to this.
Pre Flection
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Camille Rapacz: So let's get into the checklist now that everybody's like, well, what is it? We hope we don't disappoint. I just want to remind everybody of the process for this. So the way that I, would have you use this checklist, we're going to go through, there's a set of questions for you to reflect upon.
And step one of doing that is to use a ranking scale. So you want to rank the, uh, likely or the accuracy of these statements for yourself. On a scale of 1 to 5. So 1 would mean the statement, it's not accurate at all. 3 would mean it's a little accurate. And 5 is, this is 100 percent me.
if you're like me, you probably don't have any 5s, but you might have some 4. 5s. And so you're going to rank scale 1 through 5 and Actually, try not to have any 5s, but I know it's hard to resist. the more you can just keep it to some solid numbers, the easier this will be for you. The idea is to just give yourself a nice, clean assessment.
How do I think I'm doing in these spaces? Do I think this is an accurate statement? And then after that, we'll talk a little bit about what else you can do in terms of using your answers to do some more deeper reflection on why and what do I do about it. Because there's no point in doing a ranking if you're not going to actually take some action on it.
That's what we're here to do. I'm going to go through these and, I might do a couple at a time. I just have some questions interspersed here for you, George. So we'll see how this goes.
No 1
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Camille Rapacz: So number one, I am effectively communicating my vision and expectations. So this is about how are you clearly articulating your goals and expectations to others?
Whether that's now again, remember, this could be a team, this could be, this could just a team of one. If you're a small business owner, you just have one person. It still matters. You might think it doesn't, but it does. Whether you have a really broad team or whatever this looks like people that are supporting you in the work.
When we focus on communication of the vision over just having a vision, it's really important because I know often a leader will say my vision's really clear, but they haven't really done a good job of clarifying that to other people. It's clear in their head, but if you ask their team, it's not clear to them.
There's a disconnect. So when we talk about this, it's important that, you know, it's not just about whether I know my vision, it's whether I'm articulating that clearly to others. And that therefore it is setting clear expectations as well. And effectively, when I say you're effectively communicating, It also means that in your communication, you're inspiring them, you're creating alignment around this shared vision.
So it's not just here it is, people get to work. There's this aspect of being effective in how you communicate a vision and expectations that is actually inspiring people to engage in this work with you. So there's a lot in there. But I think it's important to think about all those aspects when you're assessing this for yourself.
Yeah, agreed. That's number one. Okay.
No 2
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Camille Rapacz: And it's related to the second question that I have for assessment, which is, I maintain a clear and consistent set of goals and priorities for my team. So this is related because, you know, you have a clear vision, but then out of that you have to establish very clear goals.
Like what are the things that we're setting out to accomplish that will Help us achieve this vision we've set for ourselves. So are you helping your team then prioritize by providing that clarity versus being a micromanager and telling them literally every day and every minute what they should be doing.
If you're doing a good job of helping a team prioritize, they're learning how to do that on their own because you've provided a lot of clarity around not just the vision, but also the specific goals and the priorities that go with that. So those two sort of fit together, but they are different.
You can do one without the other, which of course will create problems. But, I'm curious, George, how you think about these in terms of how important they are for you as a leader to be able to do well. Like what happens if you're not doing this well? Whether it's you as a leader or one of your leaders?
George Drapeau: You know what I realized? I'm going to do this assessing myself according to my last role, not my current role, because I have lots of data from that. It's very clear. I have good self assessment and we have people who may be amongst listeners who can go back and tell me, no, no, no, you're, you're wrong.
You said four, you're really minus two. Yes. Yes. Effectively communicating vision and expectations. I mean, From corporate management, it's all about that. I mean, all kinds of employee surveys really, they spend a lot of time asking employees, how well do you think you understand your organization and your company's vision?
And I think they do that for a reason. You have to understand the vision so people are easily directed about where to go, where to focus their time. I do think it's important. I think I'm good at it. I would say I'm probably vision and expectations. Yes, four. I would say I'm a four on that and a clear and consistent set of goals and priorities for my team.
Yes, absolutely. Four, sometimes a five. I can clearly visualize the goals, the way I laid out goals and the assessment criteria and the schedule for how we set and assess goals and what goes into it. The scoring key for all this stuff. I made it very qualitative and quantitative. Both. I think I'm very good at setting up goals and priorities for the team.
So they know how to drive their own behavior and set up clear incentives and motivations.
If you're trying to drive a team that's self starters, this is probably the most important things you can do if you communicate the vision so they get it, what you're doing is you're enabling them to do their own work, not what you tell them.
Camille Rapacz: And I think that you touched on something that's important to call out with this as well, which is when, when it is going well, you are improving the productivity of a team.
And I don't know that we often tie those things together, when we think about like, why is it important for us to have priorities and vision sets? And why can't I just say, hey, team, get to work and be more productive?
Well, your job and helping them be more productive. Is if they can more quickly, understand the priorities and where they should direct their energy and their focus in order to achieve the goals of your department, your company, your whatever, you're running.
Then they're going to be more productive because they're going to know what to say no to in order to stay focused on the stuff that really makes a difference. So this becomes really important just from a pure productivity standpoint. Not to mention employee engagement. Like you said, when you look at employee engagement surveys, this does show up, often for companies as a challenge. And then the bigger the company gets, the harder it can be to maintain a clear communication of that throughout.
But it is every leader's. And I think this is another thing that might get missed in companies is that it is every leader's responsibility. It is not just the guy at the top who's responsible for doing this in the company as responsible for making sure that the vision, the goals, and the expectations are clear throughout the entire organization. 100%.
No 3
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Camille Rapacz: Let's go to number three. Number three is I foster a culture of accountability and responsibility. Not only have I made expectations clear, priorities clear, but I'm making performance expectations clear. I've got roles and responsibilities of the team that are clear and I have clear accountability processes to find, and I see that sometimes teams or organizations will get in their own way on this when they just get so busy.
It's like, everybody now has an excuse for not being accountable or not being responsible. Yeah. Have you ever seen that? Or just to like, wow, you just, everybody's so busy. They're just running around like crazy. And they're like, I'm so sorry. I'm just so busy. You know, that one.
George Drapeau: Wow. You know, I didn't. was about to ask you for an example, but then something you said reminded me my whole career at Red Hat was like that.
Red Hat is this beautiful company has a lot of really great things about it. Amazing. But one of the things that there were a bunch of us who came to Red Hat from other places, other big boy companies. And we noticed like there is zero accountability at this place. It's so weird. People work their butts off.
They try as hard as they can to help everybody else beyond what they reasonably should. But nobody is held accountable for anything at this company. And I don't think that changed most of my time there. Just so, so weird. It's amazing. We got stuff done at all, but I would also say that, I mean, the growth rate for the company steadily fell while I was there.
Camille Rapacz: yeah, well, and there's a reason why this is about a culture of accountability, like that was a culture that existed and shifting culture is really hard to do, not impossible.
And this is where sometimes we can make a mistake as we're building a department or a company, a business, whatever, you know, we're doing, and we have a community of people, the culture that you want for those people, you have to take deliberate action to create the culture.
And I think people make the mistake of thinking if I just put the right people on the team, it will just sort of happen. And that's not how culture works. Culture isn't just a thing. It will just happen, but it will be not the one that you want it. So a culture is going to exist no matter what, if you want it to be a specific type of culture, such as this one with accountability built in, you have to take deliberate action around that.
So unless they had done that, it wouldn't really exist.
George Drapeau: The feedback I've heard about myself. On accountability and responsibility is I think I'm decent. I'd score myself a three. What people see about me first as a manager is I tend to foster a collegial atmosphere that's comfortable and nice.
What surprises people is how I instill accountability, how that comes out. But the people who know me and comment about me as a manager said, no, it's clear. You do have a culture of accountability that's set up. That's clear to everybody. It's just people don't, when they meet me, they don't expect that to come from me.
No 4
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Camille Rapacz: So that's number three, fostering a culture of accountability and responsibility. Is I actively seek and value input from my team and involve them in decision making. So this one is around actively encouraging your team members to share their ideas and perspectives. And genuinely valuing and incorporating their input.
Now it doesn't mean that you're taking everything your team says and it's not, you know, management by consensus. But you're valuing their input and you're, doing something with it. So it's not just, yeah, thanks for your ideas, but I'm still going to do whatever I want to do, nor is it, Oh no, I have to incorporate everybody's thing.
So you still have a decision making process. You're just letting them contribute to that. So that's number four.
No 5
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Camille Rapacz: Which relates to, I'm going to tie this one to this next one, number five, which is I create an environment of psychological safety for my team. So you can imagine if you're trying to get input from your team and have them involved in decision making, you're going need to be able to have some very honest, direct conversations, which means you need this environment of psychological safety for your team.
So I call them out separately because, I think that they are sort of two different things, but they're highly related, totally get that. Yeah. So my go to on this, I think is your go to as well in terms of how you do this, but my go to on this is always that, you know, telling leaders to be genuinely curious and without judgment.
Like I want you to be curious about what people are thinking. Invite them to be curious as well. And to not judge what they say, but to continue to try to seek to understand what they're saying. Cause the minute you put judgment on what they say, you start to remove the ability for them to want to speak up.
Cause they're like, Oh, somebody is just going to tell me my idea. It's dumb. There's no faster way to shut things down. And you could do that purely through body language or the way that you deliver a, yeah, that's a nice idea, but. So you really have to think about your language when you're creating psychological safety.
That's why I say you have to genuinely be curious, which is the natural state of George.
George Drapeau: Man, you just gave me a pit in my stomach hearing you just have that kind of, disingenuous way of speaking. We believe in this a hundred percent.
That's a class teaching somebody to get to that point where they're genuine and using language that they mean and is their language, but is also constructive. Look, I'll say to people, you can get there. It is not easy to get there. If you're not already this kind of person, you can, but it's going to take some work and some training for sure.
I'm going to rate myself two and four, and I don't want to rate myself two on the, do I actively seek and value input for my team and involve them in decision making I want to rate myself like a four on this. I really do.
I'm rating myself a two because I think this is an area where I know I can always improve. I know I can continue to make myself vulnerable, which means open to hearing, disagreeing points of view from my team about something that I'm trying to instill into the group. And just like I know one of my, my Achilles heels in management is delegation.
I'm always going to need to work on delegation. I think I'm always going to need to work on really. I'm not seeking input. No problem. Bring it there. But valuing and incorporating other people's input to modify my own ideas. You know what I mean? I wanted myself a higher score, but I think I should probably be a two.
Camille Rapacz: No, I appreciate you being honest about this because I do think this is a really hard one as a leader for so many reasons. We think, okay, I'm in this position because You could very validly have just more depth of experience and knowledge than the rest of your team. And that immediately sort of makes you feel like, well, I'm here because I'm the person with all the answers. Even if you know their lack of experience can still contribute to whatever decision or thing that you're working on, you know that inherently because you brought smart people onto your team.
So this is where we can get tripped up. Like, why would I involve them if they don't have as much experience or the right experience or skills or whatever that might be? And what we miss there is just the value of bring inviting someone into the conversation to see what they have to say from that perspective of I actually don't know and there is value in that and it's one of the reasons why when I go in to work as a consultant or really as a coach that my lack of knowledge of somebody's business or industry can be helpful in terms of the types of questions that I might ask that they wouldn't think to ask because their lense is closEd down. Yeah.
George Drapeau: As a parent, if I asked my son to rate me on this, how do I actively seek value input from the team, from my son involved in decision making, I'd get a score of one or two.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. Because you know better than he does.
George Drapeau: I do, but also he's like, I had, you know, that wasn't part of my plan.
We didn't plan this together.
Camille Rapacz: Well, what's interesting about that is he only knows to say that because you've also set an expectation of we plan things together as a family. Yeah, that's true. Yep. You set yourself up. So I'm setting him up,
George Drapeau: but not following through.
Camille Rapacz: Oh, we're going to get to that one later.
George Drapeau: That leads to environment, of psychological safety. I would have to say same parenting thing. I probably get a four or five because he's comfortable telling me how much I suck at the previous one. There's no problems.
And in a team, I think I'm all about that. I think I score highly on psychological safety. I won't give myself a five because I imagine a five is just kind of an unbelievably great environment, but I'm four people are very comfortable saying what they feel, and there's all kinds of evidence of that.
One piece of evidence, does your employees come to you early when they're thinking about career changes? The kind of thing that typically makes them nervous, like, Oh, my manager going to make me a short timer or be threatened, like might leave tomorrow. If your people are coming to you saying, Hey, I'm thinking of making a change or kind of get your advice, bounce some ideas off you.
If they're asking their boss about their next job to be a thought partner, that's pretty environment, psychologically safe.
Camille Rapacz: that's a great example, George. Hadn't even thought about that, but yeah, I always took that as just a real badge of honor when a team member would basically asking me to mentor them in their career, that's going to manage them out of my department. Which I did all the time.
And I loved it. I mean, it was like the best thing to be able to do this. Yeah. Just knowing that that's where they want to go, like, all right, let's see how we can help you do that. You're, you're not supposed to stay here forever.
George Drapeau: I feel like there's a belief shift, a ninth belief shift here, like possession versus leave the nest or something like that.
Yes. Do you have a mindset of wanting to keep your best people forever and you can't let them leave you because they're just so valuable versus do you have a mindset of like you, you're helping everybody grow and enable and they have paths that will lead them to other places after.
Camille Rapacz: Yes. I think accepting the fact that the team that you have is going to constantly be fluid.
So your job is, you know, and it's always an opportunity. Oh, this person's going to move on. So what's the opportunity now to improve on my team. I get it. Hiring people is hard work. So you don't want to lose people, but at the same time, It's, it's like the, the harder you cling to them, the faster they're going to leave the nest.
And the more open and free you have that be the longer they're going to hang around because they feel the support and they're really only going to move on when it's actually the right time for you and for them. Whole other podcast probably.
No 6
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Camille Rapacz: That leads us to, number six. I ensure each team member has a plan for professional development and support their progress. Kind of what we were just talking about, to the extreme. This is about, Do your team members have their own unique paths for professional development?
Are you supporting that? Not that you're providing all of it. I don't think that you as a leader have to provide all of their professional development, but you're supporting it. And I think organizations should provide some, that's probably a whole other conversation because there's different philosophies about that.
But are you supporting these activities, like having regular discussions with them, coaching, mentoring them? Being open to them receiving coaching and mentoring from others, encouraging that. Giving them challenging activities like new projects or special assignments that are in alignment with things that they really want to learn about.
I see sometimes that organizations are so focused on their plans for the year, they have goals that are set around just the goals of the company and they miss the opportunity to set goals for that individual. To improve on, I'll just say like the soft skills.
So maybe somebody really wants to improve on their communication or their presentation skills, and that should be part of that conversation. So when I say professional development, you can even say their own leadership, their self leadership skills. What are your thoughts about this?
George Drapeau: ONe or two, and not for lack of intent or lack of desire, but I find that this is one of those areas where in corporate world. It's usually the corporation that's making me get on the schedule to have the conversation with my folks about this. It's interesting. I, for years, have put calendar appointments in for quarterly check ins with my team on this stuff.
Done this on my own for years, but there are whole years that go by where I just don't do well with those calendar appointments. But I do the regular check in, the things I know I should do. I don't know what it is. This is one of the things that tends to slip for me until, get somebody that says, Hey, have the discussions in work day and make sure everybody has a professional path, have the career discussion with them.
Happy to have them love to have them, but I'm not as proactive about this as I should be. I know what my standard is and I don't live up to my standard. Way too much of the time. So I'm going to score myself low on it and I'm ashamed of myself.
Camille Rapacz: Well, get on it, George. Yeah. Yeah. I think that this is one of those things that can be really hard to find time to do because of all the demands that leaders have inside of a business.
But the problem with not doing it, and I know you know this, but the problem with not doing it is that you are missing an opportunity not just to, be nice to and support your team, but also to raise the level of performance of your team overall.
So if I can focus on helping my team with some individual skills. So let's say, you know, you have a team member who they don't really have a professional development plan. A lot of people struggle with this. Like, I don't know where I want to go next or what I want to do next. I don't have a very clear path for myself. And if you can help give them some feedback, like, you know, what actually might make a difference for you long term is why don't we work on your presentation skills or why don't we work how you deal with conflict or any, anything that you see that you think would be useful to them.
You do that, you're helping them get a better gauge on what's possible in their professional development so they can start to own. Cause I do think as an individual, you own your professional development, but as a leader, you have a responsibility to help people that are underneath you that are reporting to you to understand how to have a good professional development plan and to give them feedback about it.
So that they can see from your perspective. Hey, I think if you worked on these things, it could make a difference in your career long term. So being able to do that, it's not just a benefit for the individual person, which I think sometimes is why leaders might overlook it. They think, ah, you know, then it's really is up to them.
Do I really need to do this? If they really wanted it, they'd probably come to me. But what you're missing is a lot of individuals maybe don't even know how much you do want to help them. They don't know what good professional development plan looks like because they've never experienced it.
So all sorts of reasons for you to be the proactive person in this, I guess, is what I'm saying.
George Drapeau: Yeah, it's true. I completely agree with this. I am. I really did want to take a pass on this question because. When I'm on my game, I do well, I do fine at this. I'm in everything around having those conversations, good supportive, I've come prepared with questions from the think about, I have good discussions about, and I'm open to hearing what they have to say.
I'm good at it when I do it, when I focus on it, but I don't often enough.
Camille Rapacz: Also, it doesn't have to be really time consuming.
Let's say you don't have a lot of time to do this. You're thinking, I don't have time to go meet with all of my people and have these conversations. My day is full. Well, what if you just had one meeting with your team where that's all you all talked about?
Let's forget about the goals right now that we're all focused on. Let's just talk about individually what you guys want to work on. Here's some of what I'm seeing. Here's some opportunities. Let's talk about how we want to support each other because the team, you could also set it up where the team is helping itself with professional development and you just have a light touch on that.
But if they knew that you supported it and it was important, maybe they just come together once a quarter and meet and talk about it together. So I think there's some things you can do that's a light touch that also just emphasizes and gets people's brains really thinking about it.
And maybe they start to, share books that they've read or podcasts they might start within their own community, creating this support for professional development. Get creative about it. Don't say no, just because it feels like it's too much work.
So that was number six.
No 7
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Camille Rapacz: We have two left. So number seven is I actively promote diversity, equity and inclusion in my team. So this is about actively pursuing, creating a diverse team, as well as ensuring that you have equal opportunities in your team and just fostering that inclusive nature that all the voices are heard.
You're looking out for those microaggressions, you're making sure that, you're providing as much of an inclusive experience for your team as possible.
This one may take some training. You may need to educate yourself on this.
So if you're new to DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and what that actually means for a leader, this is one to go Google and learn some more about. Because there's just more to learn. This isn't something that we're all necessarily taught. And I know you got the opportunity to go through some training on this, George, and had said, you know, it gave you some ahas as a leader,
Maybe you can speak more to the importance of getting educated on this in order to do it well.
George Drapeau: Oh, cool. You remembered that I was going to lead with that as my comment and saying, I'm going to score myself low on this as well. And I'm okay with that. It's difficult for me though. Yes. I did my previous job.
I took this really interesting class that was talking to the senior leaders about diversity, equity, and inclusion. And we had the scoring framework and a series of. Yeah. sessions, four or five of them month by month. And I thought that I was going to score real high on my first assessment. I did not score real high on my first assessment.
And then I talked with the counselor about it and I realized, oh yeah, you know, okay, I agree with the assessment. I could see where I need to work and was humbling, but it got me thinking, being truly supportive of diversity is complicated. There's a lot to it. And most of us are missing a lot.
When I look at some key indicators, like my staffing makeup, I do not have this the way I'd like. I just don't. And I have not really been that great in changing things up and making it better. I try, but apparently not trying hard enough because I'm not where I think we should be in terms of diverse, diverse team.
In terms of supporting diversity of opinions, Yeah, I think I'm pretty good, but I could definitely do better. I have a lot of work to do there. I'm fine with that.
Camille Rapacz: I think we all do. I think this one being part of the things that we need to work on as we're leading other people, it's something that I would say we just need to bring more attention to.
So when it comes to this promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, if you're feeling like, I think I do a pretty good job, I would encourage anybody listening to really embrace the idea that you don't know what you don't know. This is one of those spaces where I think we all can afford to learn more in this space about what it means to do this well.
So go learn more about this one. That's a good one.
No 8
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Camille Rapacz: All right. So last one, number eight, I lead with integrity. My actions are in alignment with my stated expectations, values, and principles. Do you say one thing, yet then you make yourself the exception to that thing?
Maybe not even consciously, and this is a hard one to self assess. You might have to do a little bit of looking for some feedback from some other people. But it is something that I see more often than people think that they're doing it.
So this is a hard one for you to self assess. So seek out some feedback on this. But when it's happening, this is definitely going to be chipping away at the performance of a team. Because this is the essence of building respect with your team. And that's your, your number one thing as you're leading a team is to have them respect you.
And it's hard to respect somebody if they're not working within integrity of the stated expectations, values, and principles they laid out. And it can be as simple as this, If you as the leader of a team say, Hey team, it's really important that we all show up on time.
We want to be respectful of everybody's time in the room. So we are always going to start these meetings at the top of the hour, please be on time. And then you are the one who's consistently late and you tell them, if I'm late, I want you to start without me. That is you working outside of integrity of what your values are, because you're saying it's important to me that you all show up on time, but not me.
And that's not okay. I know we want it to be okay as leaders that like, well, of course I'm busier than they are. Doesn't matter. Not okay to work outside of integrity with things like that. So those are the kinds of small things you can look to and say like, am I making exceptions for myself in places where I, shouldn't be?
And then how do you want to adjust for those? These are can be really hard things to do as leaders because you do have these, higher demands and busy schedules. But at the same time, it's also disrespectful to imagine that your team's work isn't so challenging that it's also hard for them to meet to the same standards that you meet.
So think about this in terms of how you're showing up. And that's a very sort of straightforward example. And you can just start there. And then you have to start working bigger and, and more broadly. Even to the One that we just talked about, George, when we were talking about, diversity of a team, I will, find people talk about, you know, yes, of course I want a really diverse team, but then they don't actually take any extra measures and a recruiting process to seek out diversity in the team.
They still use the same recruiting process and they use the excuse of, well, diverse people aren't applying for my job when they didn't do anything different to try and find those people. That's what I mean when it's like, yeah, it's extra work. I understand that I'm telling you to do extra work, but that's what we're talking about.
If you're going to hold within integrity of your values and beliefs, there is some extra work to do. It's not easy to do. If you are just saying the way that I do things is the way that I do things, that's not a good enough reason to go outside of integrity from what your stated values and beliefs are.
George Drapeau: I like this really crisp example of the thing about time management. That's one that everybody can understand that hits home right away. That gives people a very clear idea of how does integrity actually look in action? That's one example, but you can think of others.
I would give myself
three. I know I could do better. This is one of those things where I work on constantly. Because there are certain aspects of leading with integrity that have to hit me like enforcing accountability, for example. It's important for the group to show that you enforce accountability. And that means enforcing it with the individuals who go off track, who need some sort of correction or people who become toxic to the entire team. You need to show the team, you will not support toxicity, but that means I as a leader have to take care of that with a specific person, which is no fun.
So I, that kind of thing is very. Tough for me personally, but I'm, as I get older, I'm better and better and better at it. So in the past, I would say it was probably a two, it's not like I lack ethics. Let's not confuse integrity with ethics, Yes. Plenty of ethics mostly, but I'm better at making the hard decisions or making the hard calls.
And really where the rubber meets the road to enforcing your own management standards that you've got everybody to buy into exactly what you say. I'm decent at this. I need to work at it constantly. I know what better looks like, but I'm not bad.
Camille Rapacz: I think anybody who is scoring themselves higher than a three probably misunderstands this one.
Because it's really hard. It is really hard to consistently stay true to all of the things because we set a high bar. I know anybody listening to this podcast has set themselves a very high bar for what they expect from themselves, what they expect from a team, what they expect of how work should happen.
You have a high bar for your expectations, what your values represent, your principles around that. So the bar is high and to operate at, that level all the time is very challenging to do. So I do not expect perfection on this. I do expect people to constantly seek greater awareness of where they're not operating from a place of integrity.
Which basically just means, am I, acting in a way that's congruent with my stated beliefs, expectations, all of that. And if I'm not doing that, do I understand why? And so I've seen leaders do this and they'll explain to me why they're like, yeah, I know we talked about X, Y, Z, and then I went and did this other thing.
And here's why that happened. And say, I understand your logic and I understand how you got there. The problem we have is, it doesn't matter if you and I understand it, what matters is what your team experienced and their perception of what you did. And their perception is a negative one. So you have a choice of either I can try and explain it, which may or may not go well, they might be like, whatever. I guess you always have an exception.
Sometimes it can go well if it really is a unique situation and you are able to explain that. They'll say, okay, we understand why that happened and that you're still committed to this value or this, principle that we've talked about.
That's why this is so important is how often do you want to have to be doing that? Isn't it easier to just operate within integrity and have everybody see that you're consistent and that they trust that you're always going to operate in that space? So that the few times it does happen that you are outside of integrity, it's much easier to forgive that than if it's all the time.
So that's what you should look for is, is there a place where I'm sort of repeatedly just letting myself, operate differently? And you're probably know what it is because you're annoyed with yourself. We all have this. It could be my lack of, follow through in the time that I want to do it.
I really want to follow through on things within a certain time period and I just never do it. Or it could be this, you know, being on time thing. There's probably something small like that that you're doing consistently. That would be the place to start working from. And then you can think bigger from there.
Yeah. Just know that. It will be difficult. This is one of the hardest things to do as a leader is to show up consistently this way for your people, but it's important.
So that is all the eight questions for you to do some self assessments and reflection on your leadership skills for leading others.
Reflect On Scores
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Camille Rapacz: When you go through that scale ranking, the next thing you want to do is then go through and ask yourself, why did I score myself that way? So you heard George starting to do this. He gave the answer and then he kind of talked about why he started to reason with like, why am I giving myself that score?
So you want to do the same thing. Be curious about, like, why, why am I saying this? Why would I score myself a three or a two or a four? And then once you do that, maybe grab one or two of these, don't try to improve on all of them all at one time. Maybe just grab one or two and ask yourself, well, what could I do? What could I do to improve on this?
The one that we just talked about, maybe you do realize, I'm not really consistent about something that I value, like being on time or having good follow through or, whatever it is. And maybe you have a little plan for how you want to improve on that.
And then be clear about what you're going to do and what outcomes you expect and give it a try. Run a little experiment. See how that goes.
That's how these self assessing, reflecting things turn into improvement. So you do eventually get to the fun looking forward part. And not just all the judgy self reflection part.
No judgment, no judgment, no criticism. No judgment. Yeah.
That's all I have for today. Thank you for joining me for the conversation and thank you everybody for listening.
If you want to see this list of eight questions, I will drop them in the show notes so you can grab that there.
You can also leave us a voicemail at the belief shift. com. That link will be in the show notes. We'd love to hear from you and hear if you are working on any of this self assessment stuff and how it's going for you.
And if you want to just talk to me, if you've done a little bit of reflection and you've realized I might need a little bit of help with that, you can do a free consultation with me. Go to CamilleRapacz.com/bookacall. That link will also be in the show notes and I would love to talk to you about it.
That's all I have. And we will be back in your ears next week.
George Drapeau: See everybody.
