Leveraging Leadership
Are you ready to up your leadership game? Tune in to Leveraging Leadership, where Chiefs of Staff, executives, and business professionals find the tools, strategies, and insights they need to excel. Hosted by Emily Sander, a C-suite executive turned leadership coach, this podcast delivers practical and tactical takeaways every week.
Whether you're tackling tough conversations, fine-tuning your KPIs, or mastering delegation, this show offers new perspectives and actionable advice to help you feel confident and thrive in your role.
Each Monday, enjoy interviews with leaders from diverse fields—primarily business, but also from military, politics, and higher education. Every Wednesday, catch a solo episode where Emily shares concise, actionable insights on a specific topic you can apply immediately.
If you appreciate relatable, informal conversations that pack a punch with no fluff, you’re in the right place. While especially valuable for Chiefs of Staff and their Principals, the insights are useful for any leader aiming to grow.
Don’t miss your chance to advance as a leader.
Leveraging Leadership
Clarifying Your Role and Goal for Leadership Success
This episode breaks down the "What's your role, what's your goal" framework, with Emily Sander sharing practical examples like a Chief of Staff running a post-mortem, facilitating meetings, or just observing and debriefing with their principal. The approach also applies outside work, like being a supportive parent or a good flight passenger. Emily Sander shows how this simple framework helps people prep for any situation.
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Who Am I?
If we haven’t met before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want.
Time Stamps:
00:38 Understanding Your Role and Goal
01:40 Facilitating Meetings Effectively
02:20 Observing and Debriefing
04:30 Applying the Framework Beyond Work
05:41 Parenting and Personal Scenarios
07:17 Conclusion and Contact Information
Here is a framework that can be used as chief of staff as CEO, as any business professional and outside of work as well. Here's the framework. What's your role? What's your goal? So I get a lot of people asking me like, Emily, what should I do in this situation? Here's this conversation coming up. Or, oh my gosh, we have a meeting like this and I'm not quite sure how I'm supposed to interact or be involved in that meeting. And I will often ask, what's your role and what's your goal? So what's your role in that meeting and what's your goal in that meeting now? For chiefs of staff? It can get real interesting'cause they can play a whole bunch of different roles in any given meeting or any given scenario. Other business executives can and well as well. But chiefs of staff I think have a lot of room for just variety and breadth for Okay. In this meeting I am doing a concrete rollout. What happened with this customer? So I led the postmortem effort on how we lost this customer. We actually had some misses in our team, and here's how we're going to prevent them. I'm gonna give a blow by blow to whomever, to our leadership, to the board on the postmortem. So that's very specific. In this other meeting I am. I am facilitating the meeting. I'm the organizer of the meeting. I've called this meeting, but my job is to actually get some information from the subject matter experts and make sure that i i I hold the space for this group of people. I set the agenda. I. I allow people to speak freely. I make sure everyone has a chance to talk. I make sure we're coming up with the best ideas and we're moving this thing forward. That's my, that's my role and that's my goal of this meeting. My role is facilitator, and my goal is to get as much good information out from the subject matter experts as possible. All right. Very different from the first meeting. it could be that you're not even speaking in a meeting. It could be as chief of staff. I would be in many meetings where um, I would be attending the meeting and I would be there, but my job was to. Listen and observe, and then debrief with my principal afterward. So my principal would usually be leading the meeting or having a key part in the meeting, and they were up there, front and center, spotlight, all that stuff, and they could take in only so much as they were giving their part of the presentation. But my job was to listen and observe and hear what people said. And hear what people did not say and observe people's body language and, oh, like when, you know, he said that this group leaned back and when she said that people look kind of confused, I don't think that's very clear. Or Hey, okay, these people were team so and so and these people were clearly team not so and so type of thing. And just debrief on my observations and what I picked up, which would be very different. Some of them would be the same, but it could be very different than what my principal picked up on. And we would compare notes and have a brainstorm session afterward. So that could be the point. I might not even say anything, or you might not even say anything in a meeting as chief of staff sometimes. And there were times when I wasn't even at the table, so when we would have these, you know, big, big, um, kind of meetings and big conference room with a big conference table, and we'd have kind of a strategic partner or maybe a strategic customer come in, um, or whatnot. There would be like a group of people at the table and then there'd be a group of people. Sitting against the wall. So their chairs would be against the wall and they would sit back there. I would sit back there because I wanted the wide angle. I wanted like let me take in this whole scene and see people from this side and that side and the people kind of behind the scenes. So, you know, we had people visiting who they weren't at the table. Either their principal was or their kind of boss was. I wanted to see like their reaction as well.'cause we know how those. Those debrief conversations go on that end. So like what were they picking up on? What was their vibe? Were they picking up where we were laying down, or they're like, I'm not having this at all. So I wanted that whole thing, but my job was to observe and listen and then debrief with my principal afterward. So I. That's just a few examples for Chief of staff. This can be for any role you have as COO, as VP of Operations for chief people Officer for product, technology, finance, et cetera, et cetera. What's my role in this particular meeting, in this particular interaction, even sometimes. And what's my goal for this meeting or for this interaction? For example. This one, I've gotta go deep dive, I've gotta get source data. I've gotta make sure that people have the timeline. I gotta go blow by blow almost hour by hour on this postmortem timeline type of thing. I gotta collect that information. Um, okay. Okay. For the, I'm just gonna observe type of thing. All right. Let me just kind of think through who's gonna be at that meeting. What I know about what they want and their agendas, and kind of see how this thing unfolds and just, maybe make some notes during the meeting, either on a piece of paper or just mental notes to debrief with, uh, my, my principal on what, uh, observations, what questions would I have that didn't quite make sense. Maybe my principal has some further information. anything like that. So that can kind of help you frame up, okay, here's, here's how I have to prep for that, or here's how I wanna show up for that. Um. This can be done for any setting inside and outside of work. So if you're like, Hey, I am also a parent, and when I go to my son's basketball game, my role is as a, as a respectful spectator. And my goal is not to get kicked out of the gym like a parent did last week, because that was bad and that was not a good example. So that's my goal for this week. Um, it could be, okay, uh, my goal right now. Or like my kid is like cra like something has upset them and oh my gosh, they're going crazy and like they're off their mind, like they're not even thinking straight. Okay. My role here is to like hold this space and hold this situation and just let them vent. And the goal is to like, let them vent here so they don't blow themselves up other places. All right. That's my goal. That's my role. That's my role. That's my role. That's my goal. Maybe later that day or perhaps the next day, we revisit that conversation and my role and goal has changed slightly. So it's to provide a framework. For how to think about things like that that come up in life. Hey, you ran into that scenario and the reason you didn't get the outcome you wanted, and the reason this stuff blew up on you is'cause you went about it this way. Here's a framework that would lead you to a different set of actions and outcomes. My rule right now is to. Be the one who shares that framework with you and walks you through like, Hey, here's why this felt so bad. And my goal is for you to know that that's a possibility and a perspective to have going forward in your life that you didn't have before. So there's different roles and goals that we have all the time. Um, and this would go on and on and on, right? So, um, I'm jumping on a flight tomorrow, so like. The flight attendants have a role and have a goal, which is to keep us safe. A passenger in that relationship has a role and goal, which is to listen to the flight attendants to make sure everyone is safe on the plane. Um, so you can think about these in a whole bunch of different facets, there's, there's so many. Permutations and combinations of Emily, what should I do in this scenario? I'm happy to speak with you about a specific situation that you have coming up more than happy to, but I can't do it infinitely. Right? So I think frameworks like this, which is what's your role, what's your goal, can help lead you in the right direction in the vast majority of cases. So hopefully that gets you a little closer. Of course, if you have a specific scenario or like Emily. Yeah, but there's. This, this and this dynamic. It's kind of like hard to explain unless I talk to you or talk it out loud, that I'm happy to go through any of those that you would like. Feel free to find me on LinkedIn dm, drop a comment in, the comment box or email me directly at emily@nextlevel.coach. But otherwise, I really do think that what's my role, what's my goal? We'll get you a long way. So hopefully that's helpful and I will catch you next week on leveraging leadership.