210 | The Jackass in the Room Is You | Leadership, Delegation & Systems with AI Frameworks

You complain that your team won't take initiative. Then someone finally does, and you pick it apart in front of the whole room.

You hate being interrupted all day. You also answer every single Slack ping the second it lands.

Same pattern. Different leader. This one's for the moment you catch yourself building the case against your team, again.

Every leader does this, Dawn included. Something breaks, and the mind goes straight to how do I fix them. They don't take ownership. They're too sensitive. They won't decide.

Sometimes that's true. Sometimes the staffing problem is real. But after 24 years of this work, Dawn keeps watching the same thing happen. The leader in the room is quietly training the exact behavior she can't stand. Answer every ping instantly, and you've taught your team that interrupting works. Pick apart the one time someone showed initiative, and you've taught everyone the safe move is to wait and ask.

This isn't an invitation to spiral into what's wrong with me. That's self-flagellation, not leadership. It's an invitation to get curious about your own hand in the pattern before you finish the complaint.

In This Episode

• Why the leader who hates being interrupted might be training her team to interrupt her
• The founder who wanted initiative, as long as it looked exactly like her own
• One question to ask yourself mid-complaint, before you decide your team is the whole problem

The Tool

Before you finish your next complaint about someone on your team, ask yourself this:

What am I doing, allowing, rewarding, or avoiding that might be helping this situation continue?

Four verbs. That's the whole tool. Save it. Screenshot it. Ask it out loud in your next one-on-one, or just to yourself in the shower.

Try This This Week

Next time you catch yourself mid-complaint about someone on your team, stop before you finish the sentence. Run the four verbs. Doing, allowing, rewarding, avoiding. Pick the one that's true. Write down what you notice.

Resources

• Leadership and Self-Deception (Arbinger Institute) — the book that shaped how Dawn thinks about this exact blind spot, for anyone who wants to go deeper on how leaders collude with the behavior they can't stand.
• Work with Dawn: Free Range Thinking, Inc. — if the four-verb question surfaced something worth working through with a coach.

RELATED EPISODE

• 207 | Why Trying to Be a “Good Leader” Won’t Help You Lead Better and the 4 Questions That Will
• 203 | The Bottleneck Isn’t Your Team. It’s What You Haven’t Been Willing to Say Out Loud
• 206 | Why “If I Don’t Do It, Nobody Will” Is Hurting Your Leadership
• 198 | You Don’t Have a Burnout Problem. You Have a Dependency Problem
• 191 | Why Smart Founders Still Answer 11 PM Calls: The Hidden System Failure Making You the Bottleneck

Send this episode to a leader you know who's white-knuckling the same complaint about her team right now, and let her have the same fifteen minutes of (uncomfortable) growth.

Chapters:

• [00:00] The Jackass in the Room Might Be You
• [00:01] The Complaint Every Leader Makes, Including Dawn
• [00:02] Two Stories: The Interrupter and the Initiative Killer
• [00:03] Your Team's Behavior Is Feedback, Not the Verdict
• [00:05] The Four-Verb Question That Changes Everything

You hate being interrupted all day, and you answer every Slack ping the second it lands. That's not a coincidence. That's training.

Want to increase revenue and impact? Listen to “She's That Founder” for insights on business strategy and female leadership to scale your business. Each episode offers advice on effective communication, team building, and management. Learn to master routines and systems to boost productivity and prevent burnout. Our delegation tips and business consulting will advance your executive leadership skills and presence.

Transcript

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She’s That Founder
2010 | The Jackass in the Room Is You

One of the toughest things about becoming a better leader is finding out that sometimes the jackass in the room is you. It's your leadership story.

Hey, hey, hey. Welcome to She's That Founder, Thursday Edition. These are the quick rants, kick-in-the-pants, velvet boot moments that represent me standing in the future, pulling you towards the better, stronger, even more powerful version of yourself with AI as your co-pilot.

So happy Thursday, Lovey. I'm here at the mic. Life is life-ing. The business is business-ing, and I'm doing my best over here, just like the rest of us. And this week I've been thinking a lot about how incredibly easy it is when something isn't working to immediately start building the case for what somebody else needs to do differently.

Which, by the way, is very satisfying, far more satisfying than what comes next. And before you panic, it's not evil, it's not toxic, it's not irredeemable. It's just human to think this way. Because I wanna talk about the thing that every leader does, including me. We start, when something is wrong, with some version of how do I fix them

They don't take ownership. They don't communicate. They keep bringing me problems instead of solutions. They're too sensitive. They won't make a decision to save their life. And sometimes the employee really is struggling, and that is real too. I'm not here to, you know, push you away from looking at a legitimate staffing problem.

But after 24 years of doing this work, I have watched the same thing happen over and over. The leader in the situation is helping create the exact behavior she's complaining about. And before you get comfortable, I do it too, and here's what I mean. I had a client, and she told me, "I hate being interrupted all day.

I can never get anything done." And in the same breath, she told me that she answers every single Slack ping the second it lands, every time, instantly. She trained her whole team that interrupting her works. Every fast reply that she gave is a tiny lesson. "Come to me first. I'll solve it for you." And then she got mad that they kept coming.

Does that sound familiar? What are you training your team to do that's probably leaving you annoyed? I've got another one for you. A founder who kept saying that nobody on her team takes initiative. Then when someone took initiative, built a whole different solution than what she would have built, she picked it apart in front of the entire room.

That one just stings. She wanted initiative, but she wanted it to look exactly like her initiative. So now nobody offers one because the safe move is to wait and ask.

I see this far more often than I would like to admit. That feeling of, "Nobody tells me what's really going on," says the leader who gets visibly rattled the second someone brings her bad news, or, "My people aren't strategic," says the leader who's never once showed the numbers she uses to think strategically herself.

"Everyone waits for my sign-off," says the leader who built a culture where asking permission is safer than using judgment. I'm hoping I can get an amen out there because I have stood in every single one of those situations. So here's what I used to think. I used to think if I could just describe the problem clearly enough, name exactly what they were doing wrong, I'd be doing my job as a leader.

But here's what I now know. Your team's behavior is feedback about your leadership, not the whole story, but feedback. Your team's behavior is feedback about your leadership, and I get why we don't wanna hear it. If they're the problem, they need to change. That's simple.

If I'm part of the problem, then crap, now I have work to do. Changing our own behavior is hard in a very specific way because from inside our own head, it always makes sense. We interrupt because we're trying to help. We fix it ourselves because the deadline's real.

We take over because the stakes are high, and we don't invite the debate because we've already thought it through. Your intention doesn't erase your impact. So this is not an invitation to walk around asking, "What's wrong with me?" That's not leadership. That's self-flagellation. And I'm not interested in giving you a new way to beat yourself up.

We do plenty of that on our own. Sometimes employees really are wrong for the role. Sometimes teams genuinely lack the capability, and some systems are broken, and no amount of self-reflection fixes a broken system. Sometimes someone needs clearer accountability or needs to just go. Responsibility is not blame.

You don't have to take all of it, but you do have to take care of your share of it. So here's the one question I'm inviting you to carry out from listening to this episode. you catch yourself mid-complaint about your team, ask this question before you finish that complaint: " what am I doing, allowing, rewarding, or avoiding that might be helping this situation to continue?"

Doing, allowing, rewarding, avoiding. Four verbs. That's it. That's the whole tool. And if everyone around you keeps doing the same frustrating thing, at some point, you have to get curious about the one variable that's always in the room, and that is you.

So here's what I would love for you to remember. Your team's behavior is feedback, not the verdict, and the minute you can see your own part in it, you have somewhere to lead from, and that's the whole shift. I don't have anything to sell you in this one, so if this hit something, I'm inviting you not to keep it to yourself.

Send it to a leader you know who might be white-knuckling the same complaint about their team right now and let her have the same fifteen minutes of uncomfortable I just delivered to you. You're welcome. You are not the villain of this story. You're just the one variable that's always in the room, and that's not a life sentence.

It's the most useful information you're gonna get all week because it's the one thing you actually have the power to change. I'll see you Tuesday, and until then, get curious about your part before you get certain about theirs. See you soon, Lovey.