Ep. 5 - Choosing To Lead

What if the most powerful tool you have as a leader isn’t a framework or a playbook—but your next choice? We unpack the mindset shift that turns overwhelm into agency by reframing leadership as a series of intentional decisions you make every day, not a title you hold. From the first “yes” to the role, to defining your values, to adapting your style without losing your integrity, we break down how to lead with clarity, confidence, and purpose when the stakes are real and the variables keep changing.

You’ll learn how to:

• Clarify your values to define how you show up
• Balance fairness with flexibility
• Move beyond the myth of one “best” leadership style
• Apply situational awareness and adaptive behaviors
• Use a simple reflection reset to realign your choices

The Power of the Pause is a simple, repeatable way to reset when you feel off course: recommit to the role you chose, restate your values in plain language, and scan the current situation to match your style to the moment. It’s a shift from reacting to choosing—and that choice compounds into better culture, clearer priorities, and stronger results. If this conversation helps you find even a small breath of space to lead with intention, share it with a peer who needs the same reset. 

If you found today’s episode helpful, don’t forget to like, follow/subscribe, and share!

Ready to begin your own leadership journey or have questions? Visit 7bigconsulting.com to schedule your complimentary discovery call today. Begin transforming your leadership journey with the clarity to lead and the confidence to succeed.

Transcript

Leadership Choices

Speaker 1 0:03

Welcome to Shelley on Your Shoulder with Shelley Sager, founder of 7Big Coaching and Consulting. Shelley on Your Shoulder is the leadership podcast that delivers practical tips, empowering affirmations, and real-world advice to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and purpose because leadership is a choice and how you choose to show up matters. And now, here's Shelley on Your Shoulder. Shelley, how are you doing today? I'm great. How are you, Drew? Good, good. Let's talk about leadership and choices. The theme of this show really is leadership is a choice and how you choose to show up matters. And we want to talk about leadership choices in particular today. So what do you want to share about this? And then let's get into the nitty-gritty of it.

Choosing to be a leader

Speaker 0:52

Yeah, choices is kind of a theme in my life. And this idea that we are surrounded by choices and we make decisions every day. And as leadership and why this is really relevant to leaders, because I think sometimes leaders, in my experience, don't recognize the choices in front of them and feel like things are out of control, that they're being reactionary, they don't have time to be proactive. And what I see is sometimes a hands up of I just have lost complete control of the situation. And so I spend a lot of time working with leaders to help them identify you do actually have a good number of choices. And how you show up in any moment and your ability to recognize the choices has a large impact. So what I want to do is really help leaders break this myth that there is one best way to lead. And once you're in a leadership role, like you lose your ability to be flexible and adapt. So recognizing multiple ways to lead, multiple choices in any moment, the choice that you make is going to determine largely your success.

Speaker 1 2:08

Yeah. I think I've experienced that along the way as I've learned how to lead people myself. You know, you you you get put in situations that you never even thought of. And now you got to react to them. Let's get to the beginning of the story is why people choose to become leaders, you know. I think a lot of it has to do for me personally, just with the family that I come from, a lot of high achievers in it. What about you?

First Choice: Do I want to be a leader?

Speaker 2:33

Why did I choose to become a leader? I I feel like I've been a leader most of my life. And jokingly, you could say it's because I'm a Leo. But I have always been focused on organizing people and moving them towards an achievement. But that idea of wanting to do more and achieve big things has been a really big driver for when did you kind of really first become aware that this is something I want to pursue?

Speaker 1 3:05

I mean, you know you want to get going on things and make things happen. When did that first start to kind of show up in your life?

Speaker 3:12

I think actually, Drew, every in every job that I've had, my goal has been to move up to get to the highest position I could. Even my first job in a restaurant, like my goal was to be the person that everybody went to for my area of responsibility. When I moved into some of my retail jobs, like my goal was to get more responsibility, to support leadership, to be in that position, to be the go-to, to help everyone make decisions and move the work forward. So I I recognized early in my career, even before you could call it a career, my early jobs, that I'm drawn to do those things. That's in my nature.

Speaker 1 3:58

You've worked with a lot of leaders. I don't have the career that you have. And so I've worked in companies with peers as leaders, but you've worked with them in a different kind of a role as a coach and a mentor. Do you think that the people that you've worked with, they get the intentionality of leadership and the choices to be made?

Speaker 4:22

I think your question is do they understand what they're signing up for?

Speaker 1 4:26

Yeah.

Second Choice: What type of leader do I want to be?

Third Choice: How to adapt my style?

Speaker 4:26

Yeah. I don't think people coming to leadership early on, unless they've been mentored, unless they have had some experience with leaders, sometimes miss the nuance of everything that comes with leadership. And sometimes even people who've been in the corporate space for a long time, like there is this, again, I'm going to call it this myth that when I get to be a leader, I get to choose and make the choices, and I call the shots, and I'm going to have this great responsibility, and all these people are going to respect me. And that's in many cases not necessarily true. Becoming a leader is about responsibility. It is about making decisions. It is also about following guidelines and the choices that you make when you become a leader. So this very first choice, like when we talk about the choices, the very first choice somebody has to make is do I want to be a leader or not? And recognizing that being saying yes to leadership means you're saying yes to leading all facets of leadership, the high performers and the low performers, the business successes, the business challenges. When the organization is doing really well, and when the organization is struggling, when you say yes to being a leader, you're saying yes to leading in all of those facets, not having the ability to choose, I'm going to be a great leader to these people in these situations. And the rest, I don't know what I'm going to do with those yet. This idea of intentionality, I think leaders generally come to leadership with the best of intentions and wanting to lead and get into that role. And something happens, often it's the swirl and the scope, and there's so much going on when you're leading people and leading teams that it's easy to get lost in the fact that you made the decision to be a leader and understanding what that means and why you're doing it.

Speaker 1 6:42

But inside, you're asking, what's next? Where do I go from here? If you've lost your sense of direction, your confidence, your drive, or the spark that used to keep you going, you're not alone. And you don't have to figure it out alone either. Shelley Sager of 7 Big Coaching and Consulting works with people just like you. Smart, capable leaders who are ready for what's next, but need a reset to get there. Through targeted, personalized coaching and proven frameworks, Shelley helps you clear the fog, align your values, and move forward with purpose, not just pressure. With Shelley on your side, you'll reclaim the clarity to lead and the confidence to succeed, and finally the space to breathe. Visit sevenbigconsulting.com and schedule your free discovery call with Shelley today. When you get into the leadership position, what are you faced with when you start encountering all these different types of problems and situations that again, you know, you don't know what you don't know, right? You get into it and then you start seeing things. And it's not just issues relating to the work that you're doing with your team, but it's all the different personalities you got to start to understand and work with.

Situational leadership

Speaker 7:59

Yes. So this once you get into the role, you start to understand a little bit more about what you signed up for. And what I think what you're talking about in this space, it's it's what I would consider your second leadership choice. And it's the choice in how I choose to show up. Because all of a sudden you start to realize what thoughts you had about what leadership was going to look like might be different. You have to choose as the leader what type of leader I want to be. And again, what type of leader I want to be to my high performers, my middle of the road, my my steady team who's always there to do what needs to be done, and my low performers. I need to choose how I'm going to manage and lead through the projects that I'm excited about and the work that I'm not excited about. And so this choice is for leaders to think about what type of leader they want to be. And this gets really grounded in your values. So you and I both came to leadership largely around achievement. I want to draw, I want to drive results to some extent. I think we both talked about we want to be in the position of calling the shots and really flexing our ability to see things and move work forward. If we go back to the early episode, like I'm also very driven to help people succeed and develop people. So developing people is really big for me.

Speaker 1 9:29

Okay. I have a question now. This might be one of the subtleties of what type of a leader do I want to be. You started to talk about the high performers, the steady eddy people, the low performers. And I think I know I experienced this problem. I wanted to be consistent. And so what is the subtlety of consistency and how you deal with those different people? Because you are going to deal with them differently.

Real world example: Leading through the pandemic

Speaker 9:57

That's actually going to get into the third choice that you have to make and how you adapt your style. So if we think about this second choice of how you decide you want to lead, like you have to decide if I'm going to drive with a strong work ethic, if I'm going to drive with a people first focus or a work first focus. Am I going to lead with prioritizing that people feel engaged and included? Or am I going to lead with a focus first on results and action and efficiency? Because those are things that are going to show up in all of your interactions with your team. But you need to understand what's important to me. So that third choice when I get into the nuances and the differences, this gets to the kind of the myth that I get to be the same person in every situation. And that's not true. So the third choice is really recognizing that different situations and different people require different needs of you and how you need to show up.

Speaker 1 11:05

Right. And that doesn't mean your values change, right?

Speaker 11:09

Right. Right. What it means is you need to rethink the situation. So I sometimes use the example of a Rubik's Cube.

Speaker 1 11:20

Okay.

Speaker 11:20

And the Rubik's Cube that is your organization, that is your leadership. You are maybe one colored block on one side. And you're trying to bring people together, but all of a sudden something shifts. You get into a new project, the orders shift. And you need to figure out what you need to do different to align to get the same result. So you have to recognize as a leader, people are different. People have different needs. Each person on your team is going to have a different need from you. Every project you go into has the potential for a different version of you. Different times of the year are going to require different things from you in your leadership. There might be a situation going on outside of work. You have family needs. Your team has family needs. Like all of those are factors that are going to influence how you need to show up in any given moment. And the version of you as a leader might need to be tweaked as you go throughout the day, depending on who you're sitting with and what you're trying to accomplish.

Speaker 1 12:28

I get that you got to kind of be a little bit of a chameleon. And maybe that's a bad word to use, but I'm going to use it to change and alter the way you're dealing with different people in different situations all at the same time. You have talked about Ken Blanchard's thinking on situational leadership. Why don't you share some of those threads?

Takeaways

Speaker 12:50

Yeah, so Ken Blanchard is a great thought leader in the leadership space. And I find I spend a lot of time talking to leaders about his concept of situational leadership. And it's basically recognizing that all of these different situations require a different version of you as a leader. So even on your team, we talked about you have high performers, you have your core foundational team who consistently show up and get the work done. And then you might have a low performer. They have different needs of you. And that means that you need to adjust based on where they are. So Ken Blanchard in the situational leadership is really looking at what are the expectations and needs that you that are on you as the leader, and what are the needs and expectations of your team? So it's this mix of trying to figure out in any situation I go into as a leader, doing almost a scan, a quick scan of the environment and what you know about the people to figure out is this a situation where I need to be more of delegating to somebody very clear expectations, or is this a particular employee where I can give them the big picture and directionally where I think we need to go and allow them to have the path to get there? It's a choice in how you choose to communicate, the expectations you set, and what that looks like in that moment.

Speaker 1 14:20

And you shared with me a little bit of your own background where you really kind of had to put the rubber to the road in this concept. And that was during the COVID pandemic. And you every every manager in that situation and during that time had to really kind of reinvent almost how they were dealing with things.

Speaker 14:41

Yeah, COVID. I mean, we talked about this and meant, not we, but it's been talked about COVID was kind of the great equalizer in so many ways and the and the great disruptor. So you had a bunch of leaders who were already uncomfortable working in a remote space with a bunch of team members who were equally uncomfortable. And for me personally, I had a team with very different needs. I had a mom with young kids at home. I had uh somebody that I would describe as a raging extrovert, and she would agree, who thrived on interaction and people and was cooped up in a tiny apartment. And then I had somebody who was more of an introvert and processor and trying to climb and grow her career. So you have this mix of people working in an environment that's suddenly very different. And this was a um a huge challenge for leaders in the organization, in any organization. And the consistency question that you mentioned was in the back of so many leaders' minds. How do I do this in a consistent way? You can't lead all three of those people in exactly the same way. They have different needs, different perspectives. So, as a leader, there's this choice you make about staying consistent and grounded in what I know and what's comfortable for me, or looking at how do I need to adapt my leadership skills and approach to get the best from my team. So it's um, it's a shift from being very self-centric in understanding my leadership and what I need to being other centric in understanding and recognizing that there is a middle ground and you need to find what that middle ground is without compromising your values, without compromising your integrity. So this is where it gets a little bit more challenging for leaders.

Speaker 1 16:40

You know, we talked about do I want to be a leader, what type of leader? Uh, we talked about this situational leadership uh aspect of things and how you respond to the different needs and preferences of the people on your team. What are the takeaways here today? What's the bottom line? If I'm a leader and I'm feeling a little bit off kilter, and what are the things I need to be looking inward on?

Speaker 17:07

I recognize that we have a very strong theme of self-awareness in this podcast. And I'm gonna lean into the self-awareness again. But as a leader, there is a need for you to pause. There is a need for you to be very clear. If I'm choosing to be a leader, recognizing that I'm gonna be a full-on leader in all situations. So, first off, you make the choice to be a leader. The second is being very clear about your values. So, am I a results-oriented, am I a people-oriented, to recognize what your motivation is going to be and how you show up in those situations. That third choice is to reflect on what are the needs of the situation. As a leader, I know why I chose to be a leader, I know what my values are. And now I need to look externally at the people around me to gauge what their needs are and find the right match between what they need and what I need and how we move forward together. And those are all choices that leaders make. The challenge happens when leaders lose sight that those are choices that they get, they get to make. You get to choose to be a leader. You get to choose to focus and prioritize the values that you hold as a leader. And you get to choose how you show up in your interactions with your team and with the people around you. It can feel like a lot of pressure and it can feel like so many things, other people's role models, other people's expectations, that sometimes it feels like we're reacting when what we need to be is very intentional in how we show up. Being intentional as a leader is a choice. Next call that we get into, we'll talk about one of the tips or one of the tools to help you be grounded and more intentional in those spaces. But my point today is to help leaders understand that leadership is about intentional choices. And the more that you can stop and think about and reflect on this is a situation. Do I have a choice? What is the choice that I get to make? And how am I going to make that choice based on my motivation, my values, and the needs of the people around me?

Speaker 1 19:25

Awesome. Any final thoughts on this one? Choose wisely. So next time we will be talking about, you mentioned the power of the pause. And so I think for me, when I go through this conversation, and I think if I'm in that leadership position and I'm having these things that are niggling in my brain and making me wonder, I got to do these things you just laid out vision, values, purpose, get my, you know, understanding of where I'm at, reflecting on the situation, and then kind of deciding what the choices are. And the way to get there is to take that breath and the power of the pause, which we'll talk about next time. All right, Shelley. Well, it's been fun, and we'll see you in the next episode. Thanks, Drew. Thanks for listening to this episode of Shelley on Your Shoulder. If you found today's episode helpful, be sure to subscribe and share it with someone who's ready to find the clarity to lead and the confidence to succeed. You can listen to Shelley on Your Shoulder at 7bigConsulting.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can reach Shelley via the contact page at 7bigconsulting.com. On LinkedIn by searching for Shelley Sager, that's S-H-E-L-L-E-Y, S-A-E-G-E-R, or by clicking on the send us feedback link at the top of the episode description in your favorite podcast app. Until next time, lead with vision, act with purpose, and inspire with heart. Appearance or mention of individuals, products, or services on Shelley on Your Shoulder does not constitute an endorsement. Shelley on Your Shoulder is copyrighted by Seven Big Coaching and Consulting, all rights reserved. Any redistribution or reproduction of part or all of the content is prohibited without express written consent from 7Big Coaching and Consulting. Shelley on Your Shoulder is a production of 7Big Coaching and Consulting in partnership with Left Brain Right Brain Marketing. You can find 7Big Coaching and Consulting at 7BigConsulting.com and LeftBrain Right Brain at Lbrbm.com.