The Nature of Leadership and Career

read time 6 minutes

The Nature of Leadership and Career, is a weekly newsletter where I provide 1 illustration and ~3 ideas to help you connect to your career, leadership, or work journey in a more natural way.

Today at a glance

• Illustration of the Week

  - You can’t pour from an empty cup

• The Nature of Leadership

  - Why Caring for Your Team Too Much is Hurting Your Leadership
  - 3 Critical questions to guide your leadership balance

• Gem of the week

  - For every candidate who has been rejected, every hiring manager and recruiter.

Illustration of the Week

Why Caring for Your Team Too Much is Hurting Your Leadership

Is caring for your team too much a bad thing?

When I was a first-time leader, I would have said no.

But years of leading teams in different companies and industries taught me that the answer is:

YES. Caring for your team too much hurts you and your team.

It seems counter-intuitive, especially when many leaders don’t care enough. There is a fine line between supporting your team and overextending yourself. Striking the right balance is essential for sustainable leadership and long-term success.

Here are three critical questions to guide your exploration:

#1 What Am I Giving Up When I Sacrifice My Time?

Saying yes to someone often means saying no to yourself. These time giveaways creep up on us slowly.

For me, it looked like staying late to support a team member in need, skipping dinner or family time, or waking up at 3 am for a non-essential company meeting in a different timezone.

If these were one-offs, it might not have been too bad. But they became a slippery slope of self-expectation and a performance bar set for others when done regularly.

Ultimately, it comes down to not setting boundaries or not maintaining them, undervaluing our mental recovery.

Boundaries

It's surprising how many people talk about the need for boundaries but don't actually have them. We will delve deeper into this in the next edition. For now, write down a list of your boundaries around time, health, and relationships. For each boundary, note:

• Your unhealthy thinking about maintaining the boundary

• A new healthy reframe of that thought

• How you will know the boundary is being crossed

• An SoS plan

Mental Recovery and the Neuroscience of Overcommitment

Neuroscience tells us that our brains need downtime to process information and recover from stress. Constantly crossing your time boundaries disrupts this recovery process.

The prefrontal cortex, responsible for decision-making and problem-solving, becomes less effective under continuous stress. This can impair your leadership capabilities, leading to poorer decision-making and decreased productivity.

#2 If Maintaining Boundaries Didn't Affect My Team's Respect for Me, Would I Approach Change?

Our need for people to see us as caring, smart, reliable, credible, and professional drives us to destructive actions.

We fear losing respect or status in the eyes of our team members and leaders.

Personally, I’ve witnessed and been subject to so much poor leadership that my pendulum swung too far the other way, sacrificing my time, personal relationships, and health.

The Pitfall of People Pleasing and Embracing Tough Conversations

“I can’t give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: Try to please everybody.”

Whatever our reasons for people pleasing, the opposite involves leaning into the discomfort of saying no, having hard conversations, and living with people’s disappointment.

Often, we say yes because the discomfort of saying no and facing others' disappointment feels harder than doing the “yes” action resentfully.

Effective leaders are not afraid of hard conversations—or they are afraid and do it anyway. One of the best resources around this is Crucial Conversations.

Building Real Respect

Respect doesn’t come from always saying yes or shielding your team from every challenge. It comes from being authentic and standing by your principles.

By maintaining your boundaries and engaging in tough conversations when necessary, you show your team that you trust them to handle difficult situations. This trust and transparency build a stronger, more resilient team.

#3 By Shielding My Team, Am I Preventing Them from Building Essential Professional Skills?

A number of years ago, I worked in a toxic department. I shielded my team from detrimental behaviors, politics, and decisions so they could innovate and get their work done. It reached a point where I needed to leave the company due to the toxicity, but I felt indebted to my team to keep protecting them.

My mentor and former boss at another company said, “Ness, they’re adults; they will be okay.”

I realized then that I had shielded them too much and could have done a better job of appropriately exposing them to challenges.

The Role of Challenges

The power dynamic of a leader-direct report can often mimic a parent-child dynamic. It feels weird because we are all adults, but the actual or perceived sense of experience or seniority can make leaders protective or authoritarian and team members subservient or rebellious.

Your role as a leader is not to be a protective parent. It’s knowing when and how to filter information so as not to create unnecessary noise while exposing your team to organizational dynamics that help them navigate politics, processes, and people challenges.

The Role of Stress Learning

In the wild, animals learn crucial survival skills through experience and adversity. Similarly, employees develop critical skills and resilience through tackling difficult tasks. By shielding your team from these challenges, you might stunt their growth.

Moderate stress, often referred to as eustress, is beneficial for learning and development. It pushes individuals out of their comfort zones and encourages them to develop new skills.

Neuroscientific research shows that this kind of stress can enhance memory and cognitive function, promoting learning and adaptability.

You can’t pour from an empty cup. You can’t even pour from a full cup. Your cup needs to be overflowing to replenish yourself and others.

Great leadership is about continually inspecting and adapting your thoughts and actions to find balance.

It’s about caring for your team while also caring for yourself, maintaining boundaries, and fostering an environment of trust and respect.

#1 Gain clarity and confidence in your leadership or career journey

#2 Join the free weekly Career Soul Sessions for women in tech and sustainability. A safe space to share your thoughts, and feelings on all things career.

#3 Follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram for more Career + Leadership tips to help you thrive.

Gem of the week

The hiring process is bias and broken.

This was a beautiful and honest post by Joris Luijke, Co-Founder and CEO of Pyn and fore Chief People Officer at Atlassian and Pyn.