Difficult Leadership. Pt. 3

Welcome to Leadership Sovereignty, the podcast. I'm your host, Terry Baylor, along with Ralph Owens. Today, we'll discuss agreements, communication, and documentation, understanding the problem, how to proceed, defining the timeline and the update mechanism and document, document, document. Enjoy the show.

Right. So thinking about those strategies for coping and maintaining that professionalism, you have to learn so a lot of times in at home and in relationships, if someone starts to let's say you get into an argument with someone, right, disagreement, And someone starts to escalate their tone and their voice. Typically we match that, right? That's our natural reaction is just match what they're doing. When you get into a professional environment, you cannot do that with your boss.

You cannot do that with your leader. If your leader is getting upset, things of that nature, you have to be able to remain calm. You have to make sure that you ask nice, I mean, very good clarifying questions. Right? These these are the things that came to mind when I thought about this topic where, before before you walk away from a conversation, you wanna walk away with this information.

What is the problem? Let's make sure we're both agreeing on what the problem is. I don't have one idea what the problem is and then they don't have another idea what the problem is. How do they recommend that I address it? Do you want me to have full autonomy or do you want to have some direction in this?

Whatever the case may be, you always give them that opportunity. What's the timeline? What's the expectation around when you plan you want this to be completed? Because you don't want to walk away thinking, oh, I have two weeks to get this done and they thought you were going get it done today. You to identify the timeline.

You want to identify how they want to be updated and when. Okay, you give me two weeks to to do this. How often do you want to receive updates and how do you want them? You want them emailed? You want to do them in one on ones?

How do you want to do that? And then you document everything that you gathered and you send it back to them for confirmation. Right? These are those steps of being staying professional even when things get tense. Because I've seen in my career so many times where I sat and I talked to a leader and I thought I walked away with clear understanding.

And then just to find out later on that we were as far apart as the East is from the West. Right? And I had to come up with this little template in order to extract all the proper information out of that individual. And then, and I can't say this enough, The key of all of this is sending it back because if you don't send it back and get confirmation they'll say, oh, I never said that. Exactly.

Right. But those are some of the things that come to mind for me too.

Ralph, I agree a 100%. Right? Because at the end of the day, and then I went out and pulled off the shelf the next level. So some of these things that Raf went over are not just about when things are not going well. It's really how you stay connected.

Ralph, I love that you hit on the communication style because every leader is different. Some leaders want to do an I'm Some leaders want an email. I've heard all different kinds of things. I've heard people say I'm you, some people want an I'm right back immediately. Granted, but you can negotiate what that feels like and how that cadence should go.

Some are, hey, if I send you an email, I like to have that email answered within twenty four hours. Some say within the business day. So having a clear understanding of really and how I put it in the notes were setting boundaries and managing expectations. Because certain things it may not make sense that you answer an I'm within five minutes because you're in meetings and you have to be engaged. Or maybe you can just, maybe, hey, if I get it, if I'm in the middle of something, I'll thumbs up it and then I'll get back with you before that, whatever within three hours, four hours, wherever that negotiated item is.

So I love the fact that you are highlighting agreements, communication and documentation. The other thing I want to take that documentation step or item just one step further. You also need your own personal documentation of what you believe is going on in this scenario. And that's going to serve you for a couple of different reasons. And I'm just speaking anecdotally here and also speaking from experience as well.

So one thing that that gives you is you have a running tally of what's going on. And I would say when you write it, write it as if it's you and your best friend. You're just having a dialogue. Hey, this is what I saw. This is what I experienced.

The other reason why that's good is it's healthy for you because now you've been able to release whatever it is that has you concerned or that you believe needs to be documented. So this document is about the experience. You may decide to journal every day and you may decide to do it only when significant events occur. You may decide to do it weekly. It is a healthy exercise to have because now let's say I've never had to get to this point or I've haven't worked with anyone who's gotten to this point, let's say that you have to, they're asking you about events and circumstances and situations.

Now you have something that you can go back to date it. You don't have to fill in the blanks or the gaps because you've already documented. That's right.

That's right. That's right. You had mentioned something last week that we probably gonna dive into at a future date and it's about the HR process. So there's this assumption that HR is there to only protect the employees from the company. But the reality is HR is there to protect the company.

Now, when you get into leadership roles and you have to deal with HR documentation is king. Documentation is king. I want you to remember that documentation is king. You probably have never heard someone tell you that you need to be documenting your interactions with your boss, unless it was a negative situation, right? Or you need to be documenting your interactions with your direct reports.

Right? The reason why that is so paramount is if it gets to a place where it's you against them, whatever the case may be, documentation is king. It is a good practice to Terry's point to incorporate documentation into your routine at work every day. And some people may say, oh, it's just, you know, it's this admit, it's additional administrative overhead. I don't have time to do that.

The moment you get into a situation where you wish you had that documentation, it all becomes worth it. And if you've never gone through one of those situations which we have, we realize that it is documentation is king. So and what documentation also brings is accountability. Right? Because your leader is going to make sure that they try to keep you accountable.

Your documentation keeps your leader accountable. So just wanted to throw that in there too.

No, certainly does. And just, I've been in situations where I've had leaders who aren't as really organized. And so when I found myself ping ponging and I'm like, I don't like it, this is going. So when I started keeping those notes and sending them back and checking the boxes, I saw their structure get a little better. Oh yeah.

That's a great Right? Point.

They understood that it was being documented. And we've heard the term managing up. That's a technique to manage up. So now they see that they're being held accountable. Even on that, right, have some cadence with your leader.

If that leader is not giving you time at least every two weeks, I mean, at a minimum. Now we've read a book, Ralph, that says that those really aren't effective. And I challenged it, But when I started really getting into the weeds of why it wasn't effective and their explanation, I basically said, you know what, I see it. But at minimum, you at least want to be meeting with your leader every two weeks because without some face to face time and even in this post pandemic, I think we're, I have a really, really, really good friend. Let me share this because this person shared this with me.

Really good friend who's in HR and what she shared with me is look, the pandemic days are over. That warm fuzzy, that kumbaya, we're all together in this. Terry, those days are gone. Matter of fact, we may have gone backwards. What she shared to me.

So what does she mean by that? What she meant by going backwards is the corporate infrastructure from a leadership standpoint had really basically we saw the humanitarian side of it in an extreme way.

That's

Because and I get it. We were seeing some pretty horrific things. I don't know if we really had an opportunity to really deal with what we went through. 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.