So You Care about Leading, Now What? Your Approach

Use this episode to reflect on how you want to approach your capacity to lead.

I introduce the A. Sophia Method and a framework for the capacity lead, so you can immediately apply it to your experiences. 

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We need better leaders. We need more people who care about people. We need more people who genuinely intend to carry out the missions they have committed to. Missions that bring out the better side of our humanity. Missions that heal and missions that impact. Are you one of those better leaders? Or do you know someone who is? Or have you lost hope in us having better leaders? Or are you simply curious if it could still be possible? I'm here starting a conversation with you so we can go on a journey together to actually answer these questions. And whatever conclusion you come to, at least you will know what is and what isn't worth leading. We're continuing our conversation about what's worth leading. As a reminder, this podcast is for people who are hesitant about leadership, lost hope in leadership, curious about leadership, former leaders who are looking back in hindsight, or even current leaders who are making some adjustments. Feel free to join the conversation at any point in time, regardless of the reason. If you want some additional resources or want to stay connected, uh please visit worthleadingpodcast.com. There's a blog there. I reflect on the process of recording these episodes. There are downloadable resources. There's one right now. There will be more. And like I said, you can contact me. You have any questions, if you have any ideas, if you want to just say, hey, how's it going? I'm listening. Feel free to message me there. So now we're gonna start today's episode. Today's episode is called So You Care Now What Your Approach. So the last episode was Do You Really Care Your Why? And so we determined that the people who are continuing on in these episodes or are curious about these episodes truly have determined that they truly care about leadership or leading. So this is a great space to be in. We have trimmed some fat, I would say. And now we're getting into the meat of things. People who truly are interested in leading. Okay, so how do we go about talking about what your approach is now that you care? There's a lot of things that we could do, but I'm going to try to focus this because I only have a limited amount of time. But the key thing that I want to say before I get into methods of practical things that you can do, I want to frame it in this thought pattern or this this thought process is from small bucket to large bucket. If you are going to lead other people, the question is who and where will you lead? So are you going to focus your leadership capacity and actions at home, in your own neighborhood, in your own community, in your city, in your state, in your country, or is this just focused on a work thing, like a company that you work for, job that you work for? Ground yourself and think about where you want to start practicing. And it's very, very important that you think about this because depending on what environment or depending on what system you are developing your muscle for leadership, although it can go across, and these frameworks that I'm bringing out are for being adaptable in different systems and different environments. There are certain things that you need to do if you are leading at home or in your neighborhood versus leading at work. There's certain constraints that you're gonna have. You may not have the same constraints at home versus at a job. You may not have the same constraints at work at a job as something that is in your state. Let's say it's political. So think about the environment and system that you are going to be functioning in. That's the first thing that I will say that you need to document. Also, one of the things that I will say just for this episode in general, I really want you, if you can, to, and I've said this at the beginning of this podcast, but I do think it's important that you have some type of notes. You can take the notes, pencil, using a note app, whatever you want to do, but we want to really be able to brainstorm and organize ideas. So however you brainstorm, however you document, however you organize your ideas, do that, use that. I've told you all before that I like pencils. Even in front of me right now, I have three pieces of paper with notes and drawings and lists and checks, and then a pencil, and then I also have a cup. I actually, and I am digressing a little bit. My apologies, but I'm gonna digress. I have this cup, it's a coffee cup, but I I have hot water. So I actually drink warm water before I do this episode. A lot of times I'm recording in the morning time, and so my voice isn't necessarily ready a hundred percent or warmed up completely early in the morning. So I'm kind of careful. I drink warm water and then I start. You'll be like, Well, Amanda, why don't you record in the afternoon and the evening? Because I'm tired. I am tired, and the best version of me comes out in the morning, and I have all the ideas and all the freshness and excitement. I am a morning person, I have realized that. So I want to give you my best. I want to be at my best when I'm recording these episodes, so I record in the morning time most of the time. So yeah, I have my hot water. You may have noticed, like with my voice, like some episodes it may be a little bit deeper, a little higher. It just depends on what it's giving this instrument of my voice in the morning time. So, yeah, that's just a quick note. Quick side note. But yeah, I have my cup of warm water. Anyway, we've said that we need to be conscious of environment and where you're gonna do your leadership and where you're gonna be practicing and developing this muscle for leadership. Now that you've thought about that, I want to introduce you to some things. So I have personally developed a method. It's called the A Sophia method. I'm not going to explain every component of it or get into details of it, but there's one portion of it that I'll explain. So the A Sophia method has three parts. You establish your capacity to change, you establish your capacity to lead, and you establish your capacity to lead better. Today, for this episode, we are going to focus on establishing your capacity to lead and the framework that is involved with that. That's what we're gonna focus on. The other ones I will bring up at other times. There's other things that I'm doing outside of this podcast that you'll start seeing these components like the capacity, establish the capacity to change and establish the capacity to lead better. You'll start seeing that in other things that I'm doing outside of the podcast. I may bring it up here as well, but just letting you know. Okay. So now establishing the capacity to lead uses a framework that I created. It's called Matched Pin C. Matched Pen C. That's it. We're gonna go over what matched pen C means. Now, you might be thinking, okay, is this what this episode is about, this framework? Partially, but the key thing is when you finish this episode, I need you to have some type of firm grasp about an approach that you're going to take so that you can take action. And so I am simplifying it to a framework so that you can play around with it. This after tried, maybe it won't work for you. I don't know. But I think you should try it. And once you try it, I want to hear about it. I want to see if it does work. Feedback is extremely important. So I'm excited about those of you who listen to this and actually use components of it, elements of it, and apply it to your leadership practices and see if it impacts in a positive way or has any impact at all. Okay, back to matched pen C. Alright. This is an anagram. If you don't know what an anagram is, it's basically a word that has words inside of it that mean something. So word or phrase is just formed by rearranging the letters of other words. Okay. So inside this matched pen C are other words that are important that build the framework for our ability to establish a capacity to lead. Okay. So the M of matched means that your capacity to lead depends on your ability to be mission-oriented. Anytime that you are going or moving or bringing people to a new place, there needs to be an established new place to go. There has to be a direction. And so as someone who wants to lead, you have to know what that direction is. You need to know a clear direction of where you're going. So if you're at home, what's the mission? If you're in the neighborhood, what's the mission? If you're in the city, what's the mission? State, what's the mission? Federal, you know, country, what's the mission? The company, what's the mission? Sometimes when people are leading, I would even say at work, sometimes leaders forget what the actual mission of the company is. And if you really want to build your capacity to lead, you need to be able to focus in on a specific mission, no matter where you are practicing your leadership. Okay. The A of matched pen C First A. A means you need to be aware. You have to have the ability to assess your environment. No matter where you are, no matter how or who you're leading or where you're leading, you need awareness. You have to be able to assess your environment and know and understand from that assessment what's going on around you. We can't have the blinders on. And the reason why we can't have blinders on, we have to have the ability to really be aware and assess is the environment that you're in and you're leading people in, impacts the people that you're leading. And so whether it is conversations of empathy, whether it is you removing roadblocks, troubleshooting with the people that you're leading, whether it's just developing general solutions as you're going along in this leadership journey, you need to be able to understand the variables, the elements, the constraints, the things around you, the system that you're in you're you're integrated in. You need to be aware of it and be able to assess and make assessments about it. That will benefit you and that will benefit the people that you're leading. Next letter trainable and adaptable. Technically, it's just a T, but I say trainable and adaptable. So as a leader, things are constantly moving because you're moving people in a different different direction or a certain direction or towards a certain mission or goal. So in doing so, when you are involved with change in movement, there's new things that pop up that come along. So when new elements are brought to the forefront or in front of you, sometimes there are new things that we have not experienced, that we do not understand, that we have not encountered. Experience and encounter the same thing. But hey, I said it twice. So when this happens, sometimes it requires us to develop new skill sets, to ask different questions, and then we need to make adjustments. What's the point? It's like being in school and being in that math class that you never used before. Okay. You were in calculus or did something and you never used that information. Then you're like, oh, why did I take that math class? What was the point of that exactly? What is the point of you being trained or developing new skills and then not being able to adapt using what you've learned? You have to be able to be flexible as a leader, you have to be able to adjust. Life, everything is connected to change. And that that capacity to change is a skill set in itself. And I mentioned that earlier in the A Sophia method, that capacity to change. If you are struggling with your ability to change and be adaptable, you definitely need to follow the things that I'm doing when it comes to establishing capacity to change. Because if you do not know how to change as a leader, if you do not know how to adapt, if you do not know how to be flexible, you yourself can become a roadblock and a bottleneck to the people that you're leading. And whatever entity or organization or whatever environment that you're in, your inability to change is a problem. Okay, so you have to be trainable, you have to be able to adapt. Next letter C conflict resolution skills. Okay. Conflict resolution skills. So in life, there are opposing ideas, uh, opposing agendas, opposing whatever, when you are interacting with other people, no one thinks the same. We may share values and ideas, but a hundred percent thinking the same on everything, no one thinks the same. And so, because as human beings, when we interact with each other, we don't think the same, we have different agendas, we have different motivations, we have different experiences. Sometimes this leads to conflicts. And we need the ability to be able to resolve conflicts and understand how uh to do this, how to do it in whatever setting that we're in, do it in an effective way to not derail our capacity to lead or lead others to a destination, to a goal, lead them with this mission that we're doing. So if you don't know how to deal with conflict, or you, I would say even this, if you avoid conflict, it becomes a problem because conflicts naturally come with human interaction. It's like we have all these little dots in our brain, and the dots are like you share the dots with other people, and it's like hitting against each other, like, oh, not that dot, this dot, this dot, this dot. It naturally comes up. It could even be a personality thing. The personalities don't match with someone, someone else. Maybe your personality doesn't. Maybe you are dealing with people you are leading having issues with each other. You being able to be a facilitator of conflict resolution is important. So your ability to resolve conflicts, your conflict resolution skills is necessary in your capacity to lead. Next, helpful. Helpful in the sense of the like is H helpful and matched pen C. Helpful in the sense of you genuinely want to help people, you want to help them succeed, you want to help them reach this mission, you want to help them reach their goals within this mission. You want to. You need to be able to help other people and focus on other people while you're leading. When you are in these spaces, there should be a moment, say, hey, if you're leading people, like there should be some thought towards the people that you're leading. I wonder how let's see this person. I'll say call them Tom. I wonder how I can help Tom be less frustrated day to day. I wonder how I can help Anna complete that task. I wonder how I can bring some additional resources to bring, you know, to make Monica feel more challenged. Whatever it is, whatever it is, you should have a sense or desire to help other people. If you don't want to help anybody and you're leading, you are walking red flag. Because why are you leading people that you don't want to help? Like, what are you doing? You need to revisit the last episode of do you really care, your why, and make sure you really care? Because there's no way that you are leading or going to be a better leader if you don't care about people. Now, historically speaking, and practically speaking, and life wise, do we have people in leadership who don't care about people? Absolutely. But we're not doing that here, we're not doing that here, and that's not what this podcast is about. That's not what this podcast is facilitating. People who don't care about other people, people who don't want to help other people. This is the wrong one. Okay. Helpful. You want to help other people. All right. The next letter in matched pen C Emotional Intelligence. This is so important, I think, is often overlooked in life in general. But developing emotional intelligence, your ability to recognize and understand and manage your own emotions and also recognize how you impact another impact other people and their emotions is important. Understanding your emotions, recognizing your emotions, being able to navigate them in the spaces that you're in. I think that in some environments, depending on what environment you're leading in, some environments are extremely stressful. Definitely could say for work. Not every work environment, but more often than maybe some other places, more consistently. So when you are in stressful environments, that stress is impacting you mentally, emotionally, maybe even physically impacting you. And as you are navigating that process of the actual impact of stress, moving parts, whatever it is, knowing what to do with your emotions in that time or how to set boundaries and protect yourself and be healthy and express your feelings or the impact of your environment on your feelings in a professional way, in an appropriate way, in a well-timed fashion, that takes a skill set. Okay? So emotional intelligence is extremely important. I think that also that sometimes people make the mistake of lashing out if their emotional intelligence is not developed. Think about a leader or an experience with a leader that you've had before. And they are maybe mean to someone who is working for them. Or makes life or work harder for them. To me, someone is doing that is not an emotionally intelligent person. Why are you doing harm to the people that you're supposed to be leading? Why are you singling out a person to do harm to the person that you're leading? It wreaks of low emotional intelligence. So if you've done that before, I'm talking to you. You can change. I'm not changing what I said. I meant it. But you can change if you want to. Okay. Next letter is a D, matched pen, C, the letter D in matched discipline. This is personal discipline. I would word this as your ability to do needed and necessary things consistently for yourself. And you could even say keeping your promises to yourself, maybe even. You phrase it like that. But I think the key thing is being able to do the necessary and needed things for your life consistently. And regardless of circumstance. That is a skill set. I myself am developing that skill set. And I've gotten better at developing discipline, personal discipline, but it is truly work. I think that being a disciplined person in general is a life work. It's definitely a life work. Truly, truly, truly. I separate my work and my leadership from my personal life. Those are my boundaries. Listen, if you can't convince yourself in private to wash your face when you know you need to wash your face, what makes you think that you can not only tell other people to wash their face, but model what it is to wash your face and do that consistently around other people? First of all, you're not washing your face on your own. People are gonna tell that your face is unwashed. And so how can they take your word seriously when you don't even wash your face? Maybe they wash their face because it's their own personal thing. Like, yeah, they want to because they want to just be a hygienic person, but that's their prerogative, that's their own motivation, has nothing to do with you with a dirty face. You know? It's like you can't expect other people to do things that you're not willing to do yourself. We as human beings, we want safety, we want a sense of belonging. Them washing them their face doesn't get them a sense of belonging because you're not doing it. They're not joining a wash the face club, clearly. They want to feel safe. Why aren't you washing your face? They can't model something, a path that is unwalked. I don't know why I picked this example of washing the face, but I'm just keeping it really simple. It's essentially taking actions in life and or not taking actions in life and expecting other people to do that thing that you're not doing. Your nonverbal communication, your behavior is communicating something opposite. You want people to meet deadlines, but you don't meet them yourselves. You want people to be professional, but you don't show professionalism. You want people to be kind, but you're not kind yourself. You want people to be prepared, but you're not prepared. You want people to look a certain way, but you don't look that way yourself. First of all, trying to control the way that people look, that's crossing boundaries in the first place. But you get the point. Asking of people what you yourself cannot do. It is a problem. Okay. So personal discipline is important. It builds a foundation of trust when you are in environments around other people. It builds a foundation of, I would say, even respect, maybe not always, but it definitely helps with that capacity to lead your personally disciplined. Maybe even just to follow through and be able to complete things and complete tasks and complete deadlines. You have the personal discipline, you yourself are a disciplined person, so you can execute things more effectively than someone who is not disciplined, who hasn't worked through how they are motivated and work through how to do things that are necessary when it's uncomfortable. These are things that you need to practice. Okay. I stayed on that a little bit longer, but it's very important. Next, the letter P. We have matched is finished. Now we're in Pin. Pin P. It's P stands for patience. One of the things that I mention in another framework, specifically capacity to change. We have this respect for time. Excuse me. My voice. Now I'm drinking, I'm picking up my cup. Okay. Ooh. My voice. I'm almost finished. My voice is changing. Okay. So patience is very important. And having patience is having this understanding that you can't control everything. A respect for time, you can't control certain things in time. But you can't control every action of the people around you either. So when you are leading, behaving with the understanding that you can't control everything is important. Why is that important? When you do not have patience as a leader, it can result in behaviors and actions that are controlling, that are manipulative, that are destructive to the trust that you need to build to lead. You have to, and I would say, example, one of the things that I do when I lead that has been helpful for me and my developing my leadership capacity is that when I'm working with people, I have to see them not just as a human being in the sense of you are a person and you need to do task or do things for this mission. I see them as a human being, and then they're in this ecosystem for their humanity. This person has relationships. They have maybe hobbies. They maybe have dreams or goals that are unspoken, desires, whatever. They may have medical things going on, but I really do my best to see the people that I'm working with as human beings in their own personal ecosystem. So in doing this, it allows me to slow down and really assess how I'm interacting with them in a better way. And it takes patience because there may be a deadline, there may be certain things that I want to get down or get done. And I want to collaborate with the people that I'm leading with so that they can understand the importance and value of it and be motivated to move towards that. And in that collaboration, I need to understand that I'm not just saying, hey, Tina, this is what I'm gonna put as our goal for right now. What do you think about that? They'll give me their answer, but not only am I taking their answer, I'm taking the answer of, okay, I wanted to do this in two weeks. I know every Thursday they need to have time off. Or they don't do work at certain times, or maybe there's a skill gap. And so now I'm thinking about the totality of that person's humanity. I'm being patient and say, hey, okay, well, maybe it can't be two weeks, but maybe we can do three. Or if the let's just say this is for work and there's an organization, uh, organizational deadline. So, okay, I know that Tina can get these things done. I need to bring in an additional person to help out with this realistically. Okay, there we go. Patience can go in different directions, maybe even with people who are in leadership positions above you. Still with the same thought, I use and approach. The human beings I'm dealing with have their own ecosystem. It's uh someone over me. What are they doing? What are the type of things that they have to do? What that they're responsible for. Okay, I understand why they rarely have time. And so this is very important. Understanding patience, patience with people, patience with time, understanding how to navigate deadlines in time when you can't control certain things. And then also behaving in a way that you understand it, not manipulating people, not being controlling. Okay. Three more letters in this. So we have in PIN we have an E. Ego checking. Ego checking. This is really important when it comes to centering your leadership around a mission and not yourself. That is extremely important. And I think it is maybe a little bit differ difficult in our society why we live in the U.S. in a very individualistic society. And in doing so, being hyper-focused on self and then switching from that hyper-focus to lead other people may be difficult. I think that I have personally done work over the years of separating myself, or basically, I would say getting over myself. When you're dealing with ego checking, you are really consciously setting aside your personal pride, your defensiveness, or your just need to be right. So you can be open to you know, feedback or other perspectives, or what's best for a situation. So that's extremely important because when we make a want to make effective decisions for a group that we're leading, we want what's best for the situation. So it's really important to be able to recognize your personal pride, recognize things that are maybe triggering for you, and you feel defensive. Um, and and know that you don't have to be right all the time. I'm gonna lean into that right now. You do not need to be right all the time as a leader. And I will say one thing to practice is get used to not having all the answers. This becomes fun. I'm very serious. As a leader, when you learn how to ask people questions, people who have specialties, subject matter experts, people who have been in places longer than you, been in organizations longer than you, had more experiences or or or have a unique experience that you don't have, asking them about their experiences and learning from the people that you're leading, it bec makes it so much more fun and enriching to go towards that destination. Because I promise you, you will not only be surprised, but I think that you will recognize that you're impressed with the people that you have the responsibility of leading. And when you start becoming impressed with the with the people that you're leading and you have this desire to help, I think it really increases the desire to help them. Like, wow, man, this team of people is amazing. I want to make sure that everybody gets to this destination or meets this mission that we have. This is a great thing. This is a great thing for all of us. But what can I do? And people can feel when you care, when you want to help them. When you genuinely want to help, when you really want to listen, when you really are setting your own personal agenda and ego to the side, people will notice. People will notice. So get into the practice and have the ability to check your own ego, ego checking. Okay, N and Pin, negotiation skills. Now, we talked about conflict resolution skills, but negotiation skills is important. Why? It's not necessarily because anything bad has happened, but it really comes down to when you are leading other people and when you are focused on a mission, a lot of times there are forks in the road and decisions need to be made. And we have to make decisions based on informed uh information, on data, some collaborative process. And as we're interacting with other people, we have to be able to, you know, hopefully make things win-win when we're negotiating decisions that we're going to make or things that we're actions that we're going to take. Let's do this, not that. Let's do that, or let's have it this way. There, there may be certain decisions that need to be made, and you need to figure out what's best with the people that you're working with. Maybe they're higher-ups, maybe the people that you're leading, maybe it's your peers. Either way, your ability to get consensus as close to win-win as possible is important. Now, you can go for win, lose, lose-win, and then the win-lose, lose-win is just opposite either you're taking a loss and they're taking a win, or you're taking a win and they're taking a loss. It's not many choices. So the goal is to have everybody win in some type of decision that needs to be made, or some type of agreement that needs to be made in the process of leading. How can I get this to win-win? How can I really share with them the benefits of this? Or can I understand the benefits of what they're saying? How can we reach a consensus? Negotiation skills. It's very important. And there will be times where you may need to negotiate some things that are going to impact the people that you're leading. You may need to speak up for people. You may need to advocate for people, and that will involve some level of negotiation. How can you make that negotiation a win-win situation for you for you and the person you're negotiating with, or people or group that you're negotiating with? Last letter. Communication skills. I would even say effective communication skills. Because you can communicate, but if you don't communicate effectively, it's not going to necessarily serve you as you need. Communication is the one of the most foundational elements of leadership. And I say that because everything that you do as a leader communicates something. Whether you verbally do it, you nonverbally do it, you know, with your behavior. People are receiving information from the things that you're doing and saying. So it's nonstop. You plan something. You followed through that communicated something to your team. You planned something you didn't follow through that communicated something to your team. You're in a meeting, people are sharing ideas, you twitch your face in a certain way. They may think that you didn't like it, even if you said you did. Your body language. You speak aggressively to one member of the team, and you don't do the same thing to the others. That communicates something to that person and also the other team members as well. Your ability to communicate effectively, not in a jumbled or convoluted way. And I mean it in the sense of let's just say you go into a meeting, you don't know how to get to the point. You talk and talk and talk for an hour, you're sharing your ideas, you're dumping on your team. They walk out more confused than they were before. That is not effective communication. And there's a skill set that you need to learn. You need to learn to hold good meetings. That's the first thing. Learning how to hold a good meeting with a clear agenda, collaborating, getting consensus, going to next steps, that is a skill set. And if you don't know how to do that as a leader, you need to get it. You need to get that skill set. But that is part of communication as well. Okay. All right. Matched pen C, mission-oriented, aware, trainable, and adaptable, conflict resolution skill ability, helpful and wanting to help people, emotional intelligence, your ability to develop that, discipline, personal discipline, patience, ego checking, negotiation skills, communication skills, and effective communication skills. That's matched pen C. That is the framework that I created for the capacity to lead, establishing the capacity to lead in the A Sophia method. There's a lot of other things that I want to share with you. Now that we're wrapping up this episode, I really want you to review this framework. And I want you to use one component of the framework, or think about one component of the framework and see how you can apply that to your leadership skills, or see how you've already applied it to your leadership skills and see where you are with it. Gauge where you are. Until next time. And in this, your courage is activated. And with this courage, you can choose to lead. Choose to lead something worth leading. Choose to lead something worth doing. Choose to lead something worth giving your best in rest with your humanity. You can lead. Till next time.