Why Great Leaders Don’t Have All the Answers | Julie Donley

What if the root of your workplace burnout wasn’t overwork—but bad leadership?

In this powerful episode of MarketPulse: Pros and Pioneers, Dr Julie Donley shares her remarkable story—starting from being abandoned at sixteen, to rising as a respected Director of Nursing, and now transforming organisations as a leadership coach. Julie’s journey is deeply personal, often raw, and always insightful. Her path is proof that resilience and a focus on people over process can shape truly impactful leaders.

Julie opens up about the emotional toll of working in psychiatric healthcare, the silent damage caused by toxic leaders, and what it feels like to be thrown into senior leadership with zero support. These defining moments led her to pursue a Doctorate in Organisational Leadership and write her acclaimed book Leading at the Speed of People—a blueprint for compassionate, effective leadership in high-stress environments.

We explore how Julie empowers leaders today to replace stress with strategy, and fear with trust. She doesn’t just speak theory—she’s lived it. Her frameworks for emotional intelligence, employee retention, and team engagement are game-changers for leaders navigating modern workplace challenges.

This episode is packed with stories, real lessons, and surprising truths—like why employees leave more than just jobs, and how empathy directly impacts the bottom line. If you’ve ever doubted whether leadership could be taught, this episode will shift your thinking.

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Show links:

Dr Julie Donley: https://DrJulieDonley.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjuliedonley/

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Transcript

Paul: 0:02

Stressed out teams, high turnover and poor leadership. This episode explores how self-awareness and emotional intelligence are quite often the missing links between burnout and real business growth. Dr. Julie Donley is a leadership coach, an award-winning author and former director of nursing. With over three decades of experience transforming high pressure workplaces into people centered environments. Julie has a background that spans behavioral health, organizational development, and frontline healthcare. She knows what burnout, disengagement, and poor leadership look like from the inside, and she's led teams through crises built systems that stick and championed emotional intelligence in sectors that traditionally overlook it. Now through her company and her book, leading at the Speed of People, she helps executives, teams, and businesses lead with empathy, reduce stress, and create real engagement without compromising performance. Julie, welcome to the episode. Thank you for joining us.

Julie: 1:10

Thank you so much, Paul, for having me. I am excited to be here.

Paul: 1:14

I have to say, I think I you are the second doctor that we've had on the show. So, set, setting, setting a high bar for the rest of our guests. We had Dr. Erin Burgoon on three or four months ago now and fascinating conversation. I love fascinating backgrounds, and your story is no different from a lot of our other guests in that you've started in an area where few would connect you to where you are now. Why did you get into nursing in the first place? Why, what attracted you to it?

Julie: 1:41

Well to nursing, Huh. I had no idea what I was gonna do when I grew up, and it took me forever to find that path to get my first degree, which was in business actually. But I was really drawn to people. And so, and I loved helping people to be their best, to heal, to grow, and that's what led me into nursing. And I. into psychiatric nursing specifically because I wanted to, as I said, help people to be their best. And that was sort of where, where I could see me doing the most good.

Paul: 2:20

Why psychiatric nursing? Then what? What sparked you there?

Julie: 2:23

Yeah. It's interesting. I just wanted to help people. I had a really rough. Time coming out of childhood. And so, like, my parents divorced when I was 16, which is a horrible time. I mean, there's never a great time. But at 16 everybody left. So my dad left, my mother checked out, my sister moved out'cause she couldn't bear to be left there either. And so I like all of a sudden find myself on my own and really had no support. I don't know. You know, it took me so long to get that first degree and then I decided on nursing and a friend said to me, Hey there's this new adolescent unit opening at this local psychiatric facility. Why don't you check that out? So I, I. You know, I was in my twenties still, and I figured, well, why not? And I kind of stumbled my way there, but I was excited about it. And I had not entered nursing school yet. So I started this job on this psychiatric unit before I actually, you know, had even gotten into nursing. So I was on a waiting list. So I had to wait a year. And two things happened. And the first was that I absolutely loved it. I definitely found a great place, a home for me in psych, and I loved working with the kids. And so that was the first thing. And the second thing that happened was the leadership was really bad. so the work environment, now you have to remember that in a psychiatric center, it's very. It's dangerous and you have to be very careful about how you display yourself, your emotional expressions, everything. It's emotional. It's called emotional labor because it really is laborious as to what, how you control yourself, but also how you know, understand what others are going through and paying attention to those cues, those signs, that danger may be coming, that kind of thing. so when you have a leader that adds. To the danger because of her body language and her lack of ability to communicate and connect. I mean, she was really bad. She was everything that you could imagine. She stirred up chaos and she played favorites and she was just inappropriate with the men and versus the women. I mean, it was like everything that could go wrong went wrong with her. And. Of course I was still very young and I'm like watching this going, what? Like, don't people understand that she's causing a lot of these problems? And I don't know if they realised that or if they just sort of assumed it was adolescents, you know, because nobody wanted to work there because of the kids. But it wasn't just the kids. She would bark orders at people. She didn't treat people nice. And so, and that. Spurred my interest into leadership and understanding how the impact of what a leader does and how they show up really can make or break the team and can create work environments that either work really well or don't work at all. And that's was my first experience, very young in, in poor leadership.

Paul: 5:36

I think it's interesting that so many people learn just as many lessons from a poor leadership experience as a good leadership, possibly more from a, than from a good leadership experience. Because when a good leader is there, kind of everything, just kind of flows But when there's a bad leadership experience, you start to pick apart the why. Or if you are, leadership minded, as I call it. Like you, you're aware of how leadership works at some base level, at a people level. You start to see the links between the behaviors and the actions and the outcomes and how people react to that. So I think it's interesting. I guess that desire to put your own stamp on things is why you ended up becoming a director of nursing then?

Julie: 6:14

Yeah and why I got my doctorate in leadership, right? So I went on to study leadership to pay. You know, I was very curious as to, I. How she could get away with it. Honestly, that was part of it. And also, you know, what makes for a good leader then? Because that wasn't it. And so yeah, that really fueled me to study practice get involved. And that's what, and yes, I got to, well, I, I stumbled into coaching in the coaching profession in 2001, and loved that was like a great place for me to continue to play, but with different, I. People who were functioning well in the world, you know, you're in psych, people are not functioning. That's why they go into a hospital. So with coaching, you know, that's not where we're playing. We're playing with people who are doing great things and they wanna be even more effective. So it was sort of a natural, a natural thing for me to move into. And and yes, I actually stepped out of coaching to go back into full-time employment to take that director position. I hadn't really left nursing. I had been just, they call it PRN, where you just sort of take a shift here and there and I loved it. So, you know, I loved playing in that way and working in that field. But thenI was approached by aorganisationon to be their director and I thought, you know, what a great opportunity. And so I dove in and it was a great opportunity for me. I was like the right person in the right place at the right time, and I knew what needed to be done. But boy did I have a bad experience in the beginning because again, I was plopped into this role There was nobody there to support me. I mean, it literally was handed a set of keys and basically said, okay, have at it. And I'm like, what? Like, I have three sites. Can you gimme the addresses of the other two sites? Like that's how bad it was. And the woman who I was replacing, she she hired me very quickly, like within two weeks I was hired and, which is unusual at that level. And then she left two months later. So, I. I, I was really glad that she did because we would not have gotten along very well as leaders. Her leadership style was very chaotic and, and so, but that first year it, again, it was just, it was really a trial for me. You know, I knew what needed to be done. I just needed to figure everything out, how to. Who did, who? Who did I need to know? How did I need to navigate it all? I mean, it was a big job

Paul: 8:49

Yeah.

Julie: 8:50

And I just didn't want anyone else to have to do that. Have that experience where you don't really have support from your upper leadership. And so I kind of made it my mission not only to do it then, but as I got through the years, like I didn't want anyone to have to be orienting themselves, you know, to a job. And so I sort of made it my mission to make sure what I could in that role to make sure that the nurses had what they needed. To be able to excel in their roles. And now as I've left that career and back into full-time coaching I have that same mission where I want people to feel like they have the support they need to be. Great to thrive in their roles. And that has always driven me into whatever I've been doing, whether it's in, you know, psych. And I think as a director of nursing, I was able to control a lot of that because I was, you know, I was in charge. So I was able to make sure that we were supporting the staff in whatever way we could to ensure that they had what they needed to be successful. And it was. It was great. I remember one day visiting a nurse at one of the nurse. We had like seven nursing stations, and so one of the nurses, she had been on vacation. She was the main nurse for one of the nursing stations, and she came back from vacation. So I visited her I remember asking her, she told me about her vacation and she was off with her friends and she said, you know, but I was thrilled to come back to work. I was ready. I love it here. I was happy to come in on Monday. I don't know what my face looked like, but inside I was just like, oh my God, thank God. You know? Yes. I mean, when your staff tells you that they're looking forward to Mondays, that's, it just tells you're doing something right, because we know that stress the most stressful day of the week, well, do you know what the most stressful day of the week is?

Paul: 10:43

If you start work on a Monday morning, it's a Sunday afternoon.

Julie: 10:46

Exactly. It's Sunday afternoon, Sunday evenings, people get really stressed out'cause they're anxious about their next day. And so to have her say that to me, I still like it, still gives me chills. I was pretty happy about that.

Paul: 10:59

I know that because I've lived that. Right. I've lived that like, like so many people do. It's, I find it interesting that you learn that leadership skill almost yourself. Right, like you are trialing and testing things. You are navigating by the seat of your pants in an environment that is, you can't allow things to fall over. So now I learned in retail, right? And now retail. Yes, there are some things you can't allow to fall over. There are certain things that should never, ever be not right. But there are lots of other things that you can let go for a little while and they'll maybe not be great, but they'll get by. And you can't do that in health. You can't do that in the environment that you are talking about. So you are. You know, I've always said to people, look, if you are new to leadership, let some things burn whilst you figure out the other things. Then you can pick up these other things and you can let these things burn, and eventually you'll juggle everything. You'll be all right. But you are in a position where you can't let anything burn. So I can imagine, first of all, that was quite stressful and hard for you as well. You know, when we talk about burnout and you know, you mentioned that you were, you imagine what, 155 beds,$2 million budget. It's a lot of responsibility when you've had no real, and I find this all the time, right? Especially healthcare is terrible for throwing people in the deep end and expecting them to swim. How have you got any tips for anybody who's in that position, in that sort of environment? What's the thing that you wish you'd known at the beginning?

Julie: 12:23

Yeah. That is a great question. And it's so very true, right? We're you're a good accountant, so we're gonna just put you in charge. You're a good doctor, so we're gonna put you in charge. Leadership skills require a d, they're a different set of skills than whatever you were doing before. In fact, if anything, you are gonna be less doing less of that that original work and more. Interpersonal skills, strategic planning, executive skills. And so those skills don't assume you know them like you have to learn them and practice them because even if you read a great book on leadership. Well, one isn't gonna get you there. You might need to read 50 or 60 but even if you do the work, and look, I have a doctorate in leadership. You study it, you have to then go out in the world and practice it because it's different in the different context within which you work. And so I think recognising that you are not alone, that's the first thing. And and getting help. I mean, it's why I coach people, right? And so a lot of times I know for me there was a point. In my journey as a director of nursing, where I really didn't have like a coach or mentor there, and I wanted more support. So of course, as a coach I just hired one for myself and I didn't think anything of it. I mean, it would've been nice if they had paid for it, but I didn't care. I knew that I wanted to represent myself in a certain way and that, people are watching you, they're learning from you as the, you know, especially when you have a position or a title. And so you get to decide who you want to be, how you wanna show up, and there are certain things that you definitely need to know as a leader. And the first is, you know, the vision, where are you going? And the second is the values that you are aspiring to and that you expect other people to aspire to. And those values should be pretty similar to the organization. You wouldn't want them to be too incongruent with what the organization is doing, but they may be a little different. And and those need to be communicated effectively to others. So. There's a lot to know. I did just put a course together on a comprehensive course on leadership called Leading at the Speed of People. It's not out yet. It should be out within the next couple weeks though. And so if people are looking for a way to learn, that's not, you know, if they don't wanna hire a coach or don't wanna do that route, that is another way. But find yourself some way to. To work with or learn from someone who's gone before because you are not alone. And you know, I work with. People now, like, you know, doing performing leadership development and it's one of the consistent themes that I hear. It doesn't really matter what industry you're in or what kind of leader, you know what you're leading. It's you're leading people. I. And this is kind of how I came up with the title for my book. You're not leading things. So it doesn't matter if you're in accounting or if you're in healthcare, or if you're in you know, tech, it's, you're still leading people and that requires you to be able to confront conflict, navigate that show up with your executive presence in a certain way because you're, you know that people are watching you and your behavior sets The tone for how people are gonna be behave. And so, and you need to learn to communicate effectively. All those things go across industries, and so I don't have one particular thing that you need to know, but just know that you don't have to do it alone. That, you know, there are plenty of ways to get yourself the support that you need, especially if you're not getting it. In your place of employment. And I think that's probably the key is that sometimes we assume somebody's gonna teach us right? And take us by the hand. And I've never had that. I never had anybody take me by the hand and teach me. And so I know other people have, and they've had mentors, I just haven't. And and that's okay. But. dont let that stop you from doing what you need to do to learn what you need to learn to be the as effective as you can be so you can bring out the best in your teammates and and create a very high performing team. Because ultimately that's, there's a legacy there. So it's not just what you do, it's what you leave behind when you're gone

Paul: 16:48

It's your personal brand. It's your personal brand. And people don't realize that the personal brand proliferates far beyond social media. It's how people talk about you when you are not in the room, and how people understand what you've asked them to do. I love that answer. Thank you, Judy. I think there's there's a lot to unpick there for people. I wonder, you know, you talked about your vision being incongruent with that of the business or the organization itself. And one of the things I, I often come across is the conflict of. If I'm going to be a people leader, and I am a people leader, I love leading people and I worry more about the people than I do about my numbers and my metrics and you've gotta have an eye on both. But quite often I find that senior leadership are often more bothered about the numbers and the metrics and the profit and the efficiency than they are about the people. And they assume that if we make these things work over here, the people will just be happy. So, where somebody's kind of sat in the middle of that and they're wanting to make. More of a case for the people and lead for the people. How do you influence the leadership to kind of see the benefits of that, where they're more, you know, their focus is rightly like to a certain extent on the business numbers. How do you influence them?

Julie: 18:33

Movement from. Systems to, efficiency and metrics, and they all matter the metrics and compliance and checklists. I mean, especially in healthcare, right? All of those things really matter, but, and we do need structure and accountability to make things work. But what I saw again and again is that the processes don't work without the people. So when staff are exhausted or disengaged or even feeling unsupported, even the best systems will fail. And you and of course they blame the people, but it's the system and the way the system works. So I began making the case by showing how people issues were system issues. For example, if communication breaks down, if morale is low or if turnover's high, then those aren't just HR problems, they're leadership problems. And they have a real operational impact and consequence, including delays and errors patient dissatisfaction. And so when we invest in people, when we listen and train them and support them and engage them, everything improves performance, compliance outcomes. And and that's the lesson in putting people first. so, I think that you asked a specific question,"what do leaders do to influence leaders in focusing on the people"? And I think what we do is we stand up and we speak up. I. And we advocate, we become the voice of the people by interjecting that from wherever we are leading, metrics and numbers are important, but how do we get those? We get those through the people. So I. Through my work, I know that I teach leaders how to build trust.'cause trust is essential and reduce friction. We've spent a lot of time talking about that. Well, a lot of the time it comes down to what are we doing to cause people to have more stress and that productivity go down? You, if you only look at the numbers, then you're you're not seeing how. People are actually functioning how is per, what is getting in the way of, it's what I call friction. What is getting in the way of people being able to just perform their job? And it might be training, it might be, you know, ineffective onboarding, for instance. You know, it takes longer for people to figure it out. Or if there's a lot of fear in the workplace, then, you know, if people are walking on eggshells, all that. Effort and energy that goes into just navigating how to behave and what I can say when I mean, that's a lot of work. And so your productivity is gonna go down and your disengagement, you know, numbers will go up retention will go down. People will leave because your, you're reducing. ability for people to just thrive at work they're just surviving. And so if we unlock the possibilities and their potential by creating safety at work, by creating, being very clear in our communication and our expectations by you know, you mentioned before we started today about just having fun at work. Being able to create a work environment that works where people feel comfortable coming to work and being authentic and having a good time and working together, building that team and community. I mean, that's where you're gonna, people will get excited about coming to work. Then your numbers will come up. So it's kind of, maybe it's a backwards way of looking at, or it's just different from how other people look at it, because if you're looking at the numbers and dictating, you're creating that fear. But if you help people to do their best work, then the numbers are gonna go up naturally. They're gonna wanna be successful.

Paul: 22:34

I spent quite a lot of time in theft and fraud prevention in retail. So I looked a lot at internal theft and fraud for the business. And I tell this story quite a lot. I used to go into stores to do an audit and I could turn up and do any variety of audits. There's all sorts of things that I could check on. And I was just kind of, the business relied on me to go in kind of spidey senses are tingling. What do I think's going on in here? What's going on? And quite often I first port of call that I'd just go to the rota I'd got the planning rota the staff rota and I'd look to see how many rotas were up, first of all. You know,'cause you go into a store and they've only got this week's rota up or we've got some bigger problems about how you lead your people.'cause they need to have three weeks up minimum. Minimum, right. But I'd go in and I'd look at the rotas and I'd see the same people working late shifts five, six days a week. And when somebody phoned in sick, if somebody would be crossed out and then that person would still be rotated in again, it'd be another late shift. And so they'd be working, you know, six, seven days, some weeks, couple of days off in the middle, six, seven days. And I'd quite, you know, the store manager would come behind me and be like, why are you looking at my staff? My staff are alright. Nobody steals. Nobody steals in here. Like, oh, okay. No, I didn't say they were, but this person here, did they do all of your sick calls? Do they always come in when you need them? Yeah. Or, but they, but she, but they're solid. You know, they've worked me for 15 years. They've been here since the beginning. Okay. I guarantee you that's the one I'm gonna look at first, and I guarantee you that's where I'll find it. Why? Why would they do it? Well, because you're not treating them right. They're, you're treating them how they want to be treat but it's not the way they need to be treat They might be asking you for more shifts. They might say that they're happy working lots and late shifts, and they might be quite happy when you ask them to come in and cover sickness. But actually inside, they're a bit disgruntled. They get a bit annoyed over time and they feel as though they're all a bit more than what your average I. Other employee earns, you know, start to feel a little bit entitled. I should get more because I always come in and cover sick. I always do the horrible shifts. I'm always here mopping up everybody else's mess. And it starts with little things and it becomes bigger things. Then eventually, if nobody catches, it becomes big, obvious things. And I guarantee, you know, nine times outta 10, that was the person. That was the person that was. And it was a tough job to do because I knew that person hadn't done anything wrong, really, that they'd gone down a wrong path. But they've been treat wrong in the first place and it was hard to do anything about that because you know what? I probably do the same in their situation as well. Most reasonable people probably would. You might not go to that extent of stealing, but you'd stop to feel entitled and you'd feel as though you would do something more. So I think, you know, there's a lot of that in any environment. You know, you've got to look at where are you using up the goodwill of your people. There is only so much goodwill in the bank, and eventually you will break the people. Moving on from that a little bit then obviously you've got a book leading at the Speed of People, and I love that title. It's phenomenal. Why did you decide to write that book and how do you deal with people who still see things like emotional intelligence as the soft stuff that. It's all fluffy hr, right? And we don't really need that stuff.

Julie: 25:36

Yeah. Well, the book was born from years of watching people who had, you know, the best intentions but didn't have all the skills of what it took to really lead effectively. also having some really bad ineffective leaders that I, you know, came across. And I do tell some stories in the book about those as well. And so, so that. That's, I wrote the book, I mean, this was my third book actually. So this was, I, you know, and I have some other books that I wanna write. So I am multiple author, but this book in particular, I really am very proud of and excited about because it really does, you know, teach people how to. Lead effectively and be people centered in their approach. you know, what brought this home for me was working in behavioral health where, you know, emotional intensity is part of the job. And I, you know, as I mentioned, I saw firsthand how leaders' presence, how they showed up, how they listened, how they handled conflict or managed their own stress, had ripple effects on the entire team and how that impacted how. employees, treated patients, you know, of course in, in my area. So I wrote the book because I saw the cost of not leading at the speed of people, which, you know, creates burnout, turnover, disengagement, and I wanted to give leaders a more human centered roadmap, one that shows us how to slow down. I mean, that's the big thing is that. When you're dealing with people, you can do tasks at 150 miles an hour and do this and do that and shift from one thing to another, and, but you can't do people that way. I. We have to slow down enough to really be thoughtful and connect with them. And so when you mentioned about emotional intelligence and being soft stuff, so to speak I remind people that it's the soft stuff. If you wanna call it that makes the hard stuff work. You can have the best strategy, the smartest team and all the data, but if people don't trust you, if you can't navigate conflict and you just allow it to run rampant, I. Or if your team is full of fear, as we've mentioned, and walking on eggshells around you. Nothing works the way it should. I don't try to sell emotional intelligence as a nice to have. I show how it directly impacts results. Engagement, productivity, retention, turnover. I mean, the bottom line, right? Because we also, you know, you can look statistics on the. Billions of dollars that companies spend on absenteeism and you know, retention strategies and when somebody leaves and how much money that costs. And that just creates just such an up level. It, you know, just up uproar within the department. The landscape changes. So honestly, once leaders experience what emotional intelligence can do for you, like self-awareness and empathy, once they shift their tone of voice and they listen differently, or they respond to someone with more clarity and calm then and they see how others respond and the impact that they have, then that's when they stop seeing it as soft. They see it as essential. So let's share a story. A recent, A client recently was struggling with two managers not getting along. She was a C-suite. And so, she mentioned like they, she has to talk to them about their communication and she wanted some strategies for dealing with that. And I mentioned empathy. She's like, no, it's not empathy it's communicating. So we talked about it and eventually she, you know, we talked about what does empathy mean? Well help this manager see the world. From this manager's eyes and help this manager see the world from this manager's eyes. And she finally got it because once they understood what they have to deal with and the information that they need to be able to dis you know, dis disseminate to their teams or to their vendors or whatever was going on for them, then they would communicate more effectively. And it was like. Light bulbs went off. And so sometimes we look for those hard skills, but they're really, it's the, it's understanding what people and how they function. People are messy. We're messy, and and we need to, leaders need to better understand how to navigate people. And you would think by now we would know how to do this better, but we just, I don't know why we look outside ourselves rather than inside ourselves. And in the book I talk about. as individuals. We are the self-study course. We have a front row seat to what it means to be human, and the more we observe ourselves and absorb ob, observe how we feel when X happens or the trauma that we've experienced, and no, nobody else's Path is just like ours, but guarantee everybody's been through trauma. There are. One in six people who are suffering from addiction. Well, somebody knows somebody that's suffering from addiction or who had an overdose. So it's like if we can just be more mindful and then of course the statistics on mental illness. And just, you know what people are struggling with depression, anxiety, that just people are on meds. Totally. Okay. No judgment there, but let's just be mindful that people are dealing with more than just the numbers and the spreadsheet. They're dealing with all this other stuff, sick parents, kids, whatever is going financial issues. So when we can learn to be a little bit more compassionate and understanding, which again requires us to just slow down just a little bit so that we can connect with people. It just makes all the difference in the world.

Paul: 31:28

I prefer to refer to, what's traditionally termed soft skills as core skills They're essential. They're the building blocks that you should build your leadership on, but they're very rarely the bits that we teach because to your point, it requires us to look within. It's the hard work. You've gotta do the hard work. It's easy to blame other people, but we can blame other people very easily, but we can't look within ourselves easily or match up how we think with others easily. But I think the key is. Plenty of people start off as a process oriented leader and think about, worry about the numbers and efficiency and learn later on that they can lead with people. And it's a much nicer way of doing things. It's a much easier way of doing things once you've got it. But never, nobody ever goes the other way. Nobody ever starts off as a people centered leader and becomes an ROI and KPI driven leader and forgets all about the people. And the reason for that is because once you've done it. You realise how much of a difference it makes and how much more pleasant everything is. Why would you ever go back? So I love your take on that, Judy. I think it's, I think it's inspirational and I think there's so much that other people can learn from all of that. What's, I mean, we kind of, I'd love, I just, I always seem to have guests on. I just wanna go on for hours and hours. I could just ask so many questions and so many things I could share with the audience. What's be before we wrap the show up and we, when we close things down, first of all, I'm gonna make sure that all of your contact details are in the show notes and everything so people can reach out. If curious to learn more about your coaching, your course, your books, that will all be in there. What's one outdated leadership mindset or business culture habit that you wish, you know, more leaders could just leave behind them when they're starting out?

Julie: 33:08

Yeah, there's more than one, but I think what I would say that you have to have all the answers. That outdated model creates so much pressure and that unnecessary pressure. And again, if we're about reducing stress, reducing friction, you know, anything that gets in the way, then that would be one of'em. You don't have to have the all the answers. It's silences teams. People are looking up to you to have, there's something special about, you know, being the one that everybody looks to, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter where the ideas come from and you have a team around you. So use them. Leadership isn't about control. It's about creating space for others to contribute, grow, and take ownership. And I thought about this in preparation for today. And you know, I, it is a risk to walk in and not have any of the answers. I remember my first year as the director of nursing, I asked a lot of questions. Probably the first, I don't know, the first few months for sure, and then over time, but what it did was I. Really presented myself as, I don't know. Because I didn't know how they did things. I knew how to do things, but I didn't know how they did things. And there was a little bit of a risk'cause they're like, oh, she doesn't know anything. No, I don't. I don't know how you do things. And yet over time they came to understand why I did that and that I wasn't coming in with their answers for them. Had to hear from them first. And so, you know, people don't wanna be micromanaged. They wanna be trusted, respected, and heard. And leaders who still operate from that top down, you know, command and control style, are missing the opportunity to really unlock the full potential of their team and to. come together with their teams to create something that we all want. So that there, it's not just about you, like we mentioned the word vision earlier. If the vision has to be something that's everybody's enrolled in and we can create that together, but you can't create it without listening to your team and having, if you have the answer, then you're just telling them what. Where they're going rather than enlisting them and asking them questions about where they wanna see it go. And so leadership isn't about being right, it's about getting it right, but together. You don't need to be the smartest person in the room, just the one that brings out the best in others so that you get the most from them.

Paul: 35:33

Just the one that asks the right questions. Right? I love it.

Julie: 35:36

Yeah.

Paul: 35:36

Thank you very much for being a fabulous guest here and Judy, we'll have to have you back on'cause I like, I could probably ask you another three hours worth of questions. It's been awesome. Thank you very much for spending the time with us.

Julie: 35:46

it. Thank you so much, Paul. This has been a pleasure.

Paul: 35:49

Awesome. And thank you at home for watching the show subscribe, make sure you've given us a follow and if you'd be so kind as to drop us a rating on Spotify or Apple, that would be amazing as well. Thank you very much and I'll see you next week on MarketPulse Pros and Pioneers.