Difficult leadership. Pt. 1

Welcome to Leadership Sovereignty, the podcast. I'm your host, Terry Baylor, along with Ralph Owens. Today, we'll discuss the important topic of difficult leaders. Developing a skill set and a set of tools to deal with those leaders. What are the motivators for leadership and how understanding the past can help you avoid those mistakes in the future.

Enjoy the show.

And we are live. Hello everyone again. Hello, hello.

You know Ralph and I were kind of talking right before the know,

right before we were going to

start recording and in all transparency I told him, I said, you know, this is really a topic that I don't know if I really want to talk about. Mainly because it can be maybe seen as maybe kind of negative, maybe I don't know. But our goal is to really inspire and keep the sunlight in front of you. Basically keep in front of you that there's light at the end of the tunnel. And sometimes bringing up topics that can seemingly be a struggle or something like that.

But anyway, let's just say what it So what we're gonna talk about is, some people call them bad bosses. You guys know in the last few episodes, I'm like, I don't like calling people boss. So we're gonna say bad leaders. And so what I was sharing is that maybe there are more folks experiencing that than we really know because just last week someone reached out to me on this very topic and how do I deal with this? And they start running down the list of scenarios.

This is how funny this is. Yesterday, I go to one of the local sports stores here and I'm trying to find my son a visor. This is kind of came back to memory. There's a young lady in this area of the department store talking about how, why are they targeting me? But when this other person comes around, it's just like, man, the heavens open and everything is right with the world.

And I wasn't trying to listen, but essentially what they were talking about was a leadership issue. And let's just say hypothetically, this person whom I was overhearing maybe needed to do some things different, maybe needed to get better. Never once heard her say in the five or ten minutes I was looking for, the item I was looking for, someone took the time to share with me, these are some areas of improvement. What we're talking about is you may be in a situation where you have a bad leader and things just aren't going well. And so what we're trying to do here, our goal today is to really identify a few things for you, for us.

There are different type of bad leaders. Not every bad leader is bad in the same way.

Right.

Yeah. So Ralph, are you just kicking this topic off? What do you, what's your thought? What do you think?

It's interesting. So as you were talking, I was thinking to myself, this is almost kinda like teaching your kids about the opposite sex. Why do I say that? Because you wanna give them tools to be able to handle the situation. And a lot of times when we're having this conversation, by the time our kids get to that age, we have a bit of trauma of our own.

Excuse me. We have a bit of trauma of our own. We may have been hurt, you know, things of that nature. And no one wants to say that relationships are bad. But you do wanna enable, you know, your loved ones to have tools so they know how to handle, you know, these difficult situations.

Right? So dealing with a difficult boss is very similar to that or a difficult leader is very similar to that. You're gonna have them. If you haven't had them already, trust me, it's coming. Nobody is immune to this.

And the and I think the reason why is because and, Terry, we learned this ourselves is that typically the progression to becoming a leader in an organization, especially smaller organizations, now this is this is doesn't count for all of them, is you are a great individual contributor. Right? And because you are a great individual contributor you are promoted to be a leader. But the skill set that it takes to be a successful leader is completely different than a skill set it takes to be a great individual contributor. And nobody teaches that leader how to be a great leader.

So what do we do? We either mimic what we see, good or bad. And then some of us like Terry and I, we actually go after information to help us become better, which is what, you know, the whole purpose of this podcast is to help people become better. So I'm excited to to talk about it. I've had my fair share of difficult leaders and great leaders.

It definitely is a skill set that you want to develop because if you have not already had the opportunity to serve under a difficult leader, you definitely will. And without a tool set, you'd be kind of left scrambling to try to figure it out. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to, to digging into this topic.

Now, I think your analogy is spot on, right? Because, since we're talking about that, One analogies of that I would use with my kids is look, if you don't have the right tools when that lion is roaring, gonna tough to stop A. So yeah, B basically what I hear you saying, Raf is be prepared.

Yeah, absolutely. And to your point Terry, don't look at this as a leadership attacking, we're not attacking leaders. We're just trying to equip you with some tools that we've learned along the way that helped us to deal with difficult leaders. So hopefully it'd be a blessing to you as well.

Okay, that's great. I love that. So first off, what we want to do is introduce the fact that there are different, as we talked about, there are different type of leaders and that may make it somewhat of challenge or give you an opportunity to leverage different skill sets. So just to kind of name off a few, we have the micromanager. That's that individual that every single thing that has to occur, they have to be involved in it.

You have to get their okay. They want to see every nuance, you don't have a lot of opportunity to exercise your own thought, your own ability and they just typically probably take all the credit as well. So what comes to mind for you Raph when you hear micromanage?

A lack of trust. They micromanage because they don't trust that you can do it as well as they can.

Wow, a lack

of trust. Wow. That's the root of micromanagement is, okay, you're not gonna do it the way that I think it should be done. So I'm gonna tell you every single thing that you have to do to get this done. And the more you gain trust, the less they back off you.

I love that. So what are some ways, I mean, I know we have a little outline here, but I love the fact maybe as we identify these different areas, just maybe tree top some ways to gain trust, in a scenario where, someone, doesn't really just exemplify high levels of trust.

I think being consistent in performance, that's probably the first thing. When you're given task, making sure that you are properly documenting them and then coming back and following up and saying, hey, this is what you asked for. This is what I delivered. And constantly reinforcing the fact that you are dependable and trustworthy. Right?

So that they will start to eventually start to trust you. Because some people, you know, again, just going back to my previous point. Right? Most people who move into a leadership role moved into a leadership role because they were a great individual contributor. Now being a individual contributor means that you you fully only depend on yourself, right, you know, to perform and to and to get an outcome.

And then all of a sudden you're in this leadership position where you are now your performance and success is dependent upon what other people do. And if you don't feel like those other people are gonna live up to your standard, then you're gonna either micromanage or you're gonna do it yourself. So I think in all of here we go to the Bible. Solomon said in all your you're getting good understanding. Right?

Understanding and wisdom is the key. So when you start to understand what is motivating this action, this particular behavior, you can understand where you can attack it and try to overcome it. I mean, what do think about that too?

Man, I think that's fantastic. And here's the thing too. The one thing I wanna add to that is their lack of trust, you know, really doesn't necessarily have anything to do with you. Right. Right?

A lot of times it's because of an experience. I think Ralph gave a great analogy on the front end about dealing with relationships and the opposite sex. So we're trying to educate or mature or give information about a topic that it could be a sore spot for us in our lives that we haven't been so successful in. So now how do we lead others? So in the same way you could have a manager, mean quite honestly, they could have been micro managed.

And so sometimes they may not even understand that. I'm just gonna tell this story, right? I had someone tell me a story about a manager and how that manager treated them. Now this person was my manager. And as time went on, I'm like,

Doing the same thing.

Do you realize what's going on here?

Right.

It was fascinating. It was fascinating. And I don't know if we've dev enough in just individually, personally, everyone. Right? Understanding and this really understanding the result of interactions and those that you've gone through and how conscious we have to be about how we proceed.

If not really conscious about it, you will allow that same tune to play out on somebody else.

That's right.

Thank you for being with us today on Leadership Sovereignty. Stay connected with us on X, formerly known as Twitter, and on Instagram by searching for Leadership Sovereignty. And just like this podcast, let's all collectively grow as we go. God bless.