#49: The Hidden Reason High-Performing Teams Suddenly Freeze

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Eric:  Welcome to the Empower Podcast. I'm your host, Eric Pfeiffer, CEO of Empower. Coaching leadership isn't about titles or positions. It's actually about the influence and impact we have on our environments. This is where we get to learn how to operate well under pressure, lead with confidence and drive meaningful results.

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This  is where things can get a bit tricky. The person is talented, they're experienced. There's no obvious skill gap. So when momentum slows, I think that feels really frustrating for us as leaders. Um, that's usually when we start to ask the question about what's going on? Did we misread their readiness?

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Dawn: Yeah. And, and we've seen this, Eric, um, this frustration rise not only for ourselves on our own team. But in a lot of the leaders that we work with. And that, like that distinction that you just brought is so important.  Um, is it like, why are they hesitating? Is it because they're not ready or did we not create the environment for them to succeed?

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Dawn: So help us lean  in to this idea a little bit.

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Eric: Yeah. So giving people responsibility without the appropriate authority leads to paralysis. Right. We we're just, when we're, when, when our team members are not sure what they can actually make decisions about what authority they have, um, it drives, uh, a kind of paralysis that we've seen over and over and over again.

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They protect themselves from getting it wrong because it's no longer them feeling like they have ownership. They're really just doing something for us. And I think if  expectations aren't specific, then they don't know what good looks like. They hesitate because the standard feels undefined. Um, and I think if leaders react strongly when decisions differ from how we would've handled them right then, then the team starts to second guess.

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Dawn: And then, um. What happened was some subtle messaging along the way  that, uh, there was, we, we entered into that. You giving me that responsibility with no clarity, right? Mm-hmm. It was just like, take care of that. We didn't talk about what we were trying to spend, we didn't talk about what type of accommodations we were looking for.

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Eric: What happened? I ended up with bedbugs. No, I'm joking. We didn't. But I do remember us getting to the hotel and my first thought was like, what are we doing here?  This, this, and again, right? Everyone has their different standards of what the kind of accommodations they're looking for.

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Right. Which, and because of what we have fostered on our team, I was able to very clearly say like, Hey, this actually created a real, a weird. Spot for me. And it wasn't your fault, it wasn't my fault. I just want you to know what we're  operating in right now. Um, but I think that's the perfect ex, like a funny, perfect example of what we're talking about.

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Be, as we've talked about a lot of times, as humans, we have a negativity bias. So when we see something  that did not live up to our standards, we immediately assume that it's on them, it's on that person, right? But if we're honest, if we pause and take a minute to look at the situation, sometimes we realize that we handed off responsibility.

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Dawn: They're wandering in the wilderness. Um. We sometimes, if we're honest, realize we handed off responsibility without defining what success looks like. And these are hard because in our  head, like we talked about last week, these are obvious.

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Dawn: Yeah, that's right.  Um, and as the person on the other side of that, um. Hesitation felt like a really normal response, like I legitimately was not sure how to move forward.

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how can we, as leaders tell the difference between a maturity issue, uh, maybe an initiative issue or the clarity issue that we're talking about here?

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Dawn: Yeah, that's good. Um. I think we, we dug into a little bit about what that feels like from the team member  side, but what behaviors from leaders are we employing that unintentionally train people to second guess themselves?

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Dawn: Yeah, that's right. Okay.  So how, and again, this is, I, this is a funny little frivolous story that we're sharing, but we actually engage clients all the time that are dealing with this in much higher stakes situations, um, with their teams. So, yeah. Talk to us a little bit about how you, uh, coach clients, leaders who come to you with a similar situation deal dealing with a similar frustration.

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So here's some things that I think as leaders we need to be thinking about. Um, you know, start by, you know, remembering that healthy delegation,  um, requires a few things. Number one, clear expectations. Clear responsibility, clear authority. And I would add to the mix an ongoing. Engagement where we are able to provide the appropriate support and challenge for those team members.

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How do we know we're doing something  well, uh, those are really important. And then, you know, as it comes to this concept of support and challenge, this is, you know, part of our, one of, one of our key tools in our toolkit. Um, it's. It's, it's providing enough engagement with those team members where we can, we have the opportunity to provide the necessary coaching, right?

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We're able to adjust our leadership appropriately. And again, that's why we created the leadership operating system, the set of core leadership tools that gives us, as leaders the confidence am I providing, um, the most advantageous leadership to give my my people the best opportunity  of success. And then the last thing I would say, you know, when it comes to delegation, we often say, you know, delegation is not dumping.

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Because we freaking need help. Because we need support because we need, we can't do it all. And so, especially if we are in a high pressure situation as leaders, we can be tempted. Great. I ha just take this on. Right. Um, that's one thing that we see. Or the other thing is we see that leaders like to  operate in certain default modes, right?

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I think it's important for us to realize though, as leaders, that we, we can tell the difference between delegation and dumping when we have built the appropriate  conditions for our team to succeed.

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Eric: Right? Um, but you can create the ideal environment in which those plants can  grow. Like I know my wife, you know, she does hobby farming in our backyard and she grows seasonal vegetables.

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Eric: Yeah. I, I  am, I am wildly guilty of this as a leader. Um, you know, I've shared this in in previous episodes. I tend to operate most comfortably at the vision level. You know, I'm at the 30,000 foot level. I'm up there floating around in the clouds, thinking of new ideas, excited about the future, the possibilities, and so I have a terrible, terrible habit of delegating, really dumping responsibility onto team members and being like, okay, go figure it out.

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Um, and I think we as leaders have to be really careful for, for, for us just to  start by recognizing am, am are my tendencies to micromanage, to be overly engaged, overly involved over controlling, or is my tendency, the o the gutter on the other side of this, this road, which is, I, I'm, I'm I withdrawal. I'm out.

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I mean, literally you could, our listeners could pop this into a document with little check boxes  to say, Hey, when I'm looking to create the appropriate environment for my team to succeed, have I done these things, um, to provide them the greatest chance of success? So be before delegating responsibility to, to ask these questions.

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Dawn: He can,  listeners, he can be very dramatic at times. We love him for it though.

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Uh, number one, we're removing ambiguity, right?  And when we leave people in ambiguity, that's when paralysis starts to set in. Um, or we're gonna get results that we're not looking for. Mm-hmm. Um. IE uh, subpar accommodations. Um, it reduces second guessing for our team members.

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Dawn: Yeah, that's good. Um, I wanna add one note to that. 'cause you were saying how, um, we, we have said a few times how  responsibility without authority, uh, is it, it causes that stutter step. I really want leaders to lean in with an empathetic ear for a minute and hear that giving responsibility without authority is incredibly disempowering for your team.

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Eric: Yeah. So let me, let me jump in 'cause I know we wanna share some practical stories of what this looks like and how we've navigated it. And I think, I hope our listeners appreciate that we try to throw in a lot of stories, uh, from  even from inside of our own business, right. That's the beautiful thing.

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Um, and  a as. I already shared. I was like, okay, great. We've got there now. I just let my team run with how we're gonna, you know, message and market these products. And I just kind of took permission on my own to not refocus my mind onto some other things that, that we were trying to achieve. And it was probably four or five, maybe four months of kind of feeling like, Hey, why aren't we seeing the needle move on this, on, on the on, on these products?

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I had, I had dumped this responsibility onto a part of our team, um, disengaged and kind of left them.  To try to figure it out on their own. And, and, and I think it wasn't until we all kinda realized, oh, we're floundering. We're not, that we're not actually moving the needle in this area. That through those conversations, I began to, um, to, to re recognize that, wow, here, here I've done it again.

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But there it's been a lack of a clear vision, lack of clear expectation, lack of clear metrics of success, lack of clear  support and accountability. Um, and these are people who are highly competent, very capable. Who were just kind of stutter, stepping and second guessing that I didn't realize how much they were second guessing themselves and the strategies they were employing.

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Come on. Like, we gotta go do this. We're fighting for something really important. Um, and so that was the first indicator. And again, going back to the beginning of our conversation, it would've been really easy for me to be like, oh, they're just  unmotivated. Oh, they just lack drive in initiative. Oh. The good news is I know our team well enough to know they do not lack those qualities.

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Um, but it's always a hard thing as a leader to have to  own like, oh. This was my miss. This is my bad. This is not, this was not my team's fault necessarily.

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Right. Um. I think we blew a, a client away recently  when we were at a workshop with them and they were like, do you guys use this on your team? And I was like, yeah, actually we were just upstairs while you were doing your work processing a situation that we had on our own team.

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Dawn: Because, uh, the story I was gonna share is another recent story. Like our, in our own organization, Eric, we are fighting for so much right now.  We are pushing the envelope. We are growing, we're doing new things and taking new territory. That's what we're, that's what we're doing.

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Decisions weren't made that you or other team members assumed were being made. And, um, because I didn't have that clarity, I didn't know that we were waiting on me for those decisions. I didn't know those decisions lived with me. Um, and so I wanna point that out because this goes twofold, right? Um, yes. As  leaders, we are responsible for making sure our people have clarity, but also as we are growing in leadership in our organizations, even if we're not the top leader, we need to ask for what we need.

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And do so with the belief of like, Hey, they're  doing their best. Right? It's not because they're not operating well as a leader. They have a law on their plate. I need to ask for what I need in this situation.

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This is for any area of our  life where we have influence and impact. So go ahead and take a few moments of just quiet. To ask that simple question, make sure you lock it in your brain, write it down in in your notes app or put it on a piece of paper. What's your one big takeaway from today's episode so far?

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Eric: Yeah. Sorry. That's how I, that's how I interrupt silence with the crazy thoughts in my  brain.

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Eric: And next week we're unpacking what happens when vision is held in the hands of a very few or even one individual, the leadership bottleneck that no one warns us about. We'll see you next time. Hey, thanks for  tuning into this powerful episode.