00:08 Hi, I am Denise Simpson, a master life and leadership coach who helps women step into their authentic and feminine power so they can lead like visionaries, influence with grace, and create a legacy of contribution and service. You'll hear about real leadership clients with real problems navigating their success in life, business, and career. If you're ready to become a masterful leader, then this podcast was made for you. So let's get started. Hey, dear friend, so glad you're here with me. I know there is so much going on in the world right now, and I want to share with you that it is normal to feel exhausted, to feel overwhelmed, to feel the way you're feeling. It is normal. Why? Because you take your mind, your brain, your heart, your body and nervous system everywhere you go. That means that what is impacting you in your personal life is impacting the way you lead.
01:18 This is unavoidable. This is something that you cannot categorize. So many of us try to compartmentalize to put into categories. Some of us put things on the shelf, the metaphorical shelf until we get home to deal with them. But trust me, my dear, dear leader, it is seeping unconsciously into your organization life. So if you are feeling overwhelmed, burnt out, anxious, fearful, terrorized by world events, know that your leadership is being impacted. And guess what? Your employees behaviors and performance is being impacted as well. Why? Because they have brains, minds, bodies, nervous systems that they take everywhere they go just like you. So of course they're going to show up in a certain way depending on the context of what's happening in their world. I have a phenomenal executive leadership client. She is extraordinary. She's quite compassionate. She has her pulse on what's happening in the world.
02:32 She also has a pulse on what's impacting her and her employees. She will take the time after a world event or a local event or any crisis that she has witnessed or experienced or has heard of in the news. She then gathers her crew, her department, and talks openly about how they're feeling and how they should, what they're feeling, because she knows through coaching with me that she takes her heart, her brain, her mind, her body, her nervous system everywhere. And so if she's feeling emotional about what's happening in the world, then the chances of your employees feeling the same way or greater is high. And she is extremely tapped into the compassion, this empathy, this emotional intelligence that she has, that she wants to make sure, Hey, listen, it's okay to feel this way, crew. It's okay that this is impacting the way you're showing up today.
03:41 We get it. I'm doing the same thing. And here's an opportunity to be seen, to be heard, to be vulnerable, to be transparent with one another. And that, my dear friend, is why she is so successful in the performance measurements of her team. I mean, these are incredible people that are all contributing greatly. They have purpose, all because their leader has seen them as human, as people, emotions, and people with limiting beliefs and all the things that we, people out here, we, normal people out here are feeling, she treats them like humans, and they show up for her in the organization because of that. And she's created such a strong culture of psychological safety. This is important to do right now. Now listen, this ties into our topic of conversation today, which is you seeing the good in your employees because so many of you are challenged right now in seeing the good in others, and I am concerned with how you see your employees, right?
04:55 This is my area of expertise, the leader, follower, dyad. I want to help you create a stronger bond and relationship with your followers. And so this ties into what we're going to talk about today, because I had another client who said, I can't believe these people are so lazy. I trained them for five hours a few months ago, and they're still not performing the way I expect them to perform. Why did I waste so much time? Why did I waste so much money bringing in a trainer to do this? And they're not doing what we train them to do? What is it with them? Are they dumb? Are they just lazy? Are they apathetic? I'm just ready to fire everybody. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. Let's pump the brakes just a little bit because I want to check in with your mindset leader.
05:43 I want to check in with you. Your employees and their behaviors are a direct reflection of their belief systems, of their thinking, of their feelings. Obviously, the actions they take are from the emotions and the actions create results in their performance. And I said, we can't control our employees. We can influence, we can inspire, we can motivate, we can try all the tactics to get them to move towards a goal for the department, right? That's all we can do. We don't manipulate, we don't coerce. We don't abuse our power. So the obligation, the duty is for us to then learn how to be better influential leaders. And so here she is complaining about their behavior that I wanted to put her on the spot because listen, you're a leader. We got to put you on the line. You're on the hook. You're on the hook to solve problems, to create results in your department that are in alignment with the organization's goals.
06:50 That is your primary role, dear leader. And so what I want to do is remind you, you're the one on the line, not your employees. In this case, I want to draw your attention to your mindset. Why do you feel that your employees aren't good enough? That they're not meeting your standards, that they're not meeting your expectations? Why do you think they're lazy, undisciplined, unruly? What is it about them? And here's the million dollar question. What is it about their behaviors? That could be a reflection of your internal dialogue? Now, hear me out before you shut this episode down and want to blame everybody else except yourself. Again, you are on the line, and this is what I get hired to do. I get hired to put you on the line. Now, listen, we're not working formally together, but here's an exchange of energy and value through this episode, and I want for you to just chill the nervous system.
07:53 I want for you to open up your mind to what I'm about to ask you. Is it possible dear leader, that what you're seeing in them is a reflection of what's happening internally for you? You see, what we see is what we believe to be true. What we see in our employees is what we believe is factual. Here's why. Because of your filtration system, how you filter information, the beliefs that you have about employees, your self-identity as a leader, all of these things contribute to how you see the world, how you want to see your employees. Listen, you can choose to see the best in others, or you can choose to see the worst in others. That's the thing. What do you decide to see? What do you decide to see is true? Is how you are programmed your neurological conditioning, your neurological programming. So this is why I want for us to step back and say, well, maybe this isn't factual.
09:09 And why then am I focused on the negative aspects of my employees? Why am I not leaning towards the positive things that they contribute to this organization and how wonderful they actually are? Because each one is uniquely designed to be here with their unique attributes and skillsets. Why am I so focused on not seeing the best in them? So dear leader, that's the focus on our episode today is why are we focused so heavily on all the negative? Why aren't we choosing to see the positive in our employees? Well, I'll tell you why. Because the brain more so the mind, the mind is programmed to see the worst in people. Now, if you're a skeptic like me, I'm always challenging folks. I'm this contrarian. I'm always pushing back. I'm always disrupting neurology. That's something that I learned as a researcher. It's something that I'm programmed now to be.
10:10 Some of you are cynics, however, two very different things, skeptic versus a cynic. You may believe as a cynic that people are out to get you or that they're only involved in their own self-interest. And that could be true as well. Now, you may not be a cynic or a skeptic. You may actually be very hopeful. You may be a very optimistic person. I kind of waver between optimism and skepticism, depending on the context, right? For you, it may be different. So also something else that contributes to you not seeing the good in others is the organizational culture. I have to bring this up because there are a lot of my clients who have said, I'm going against the current current of toxic organizational culture. This is a culture that does not celebrate kindness, does not celebrate compassion, does not celebrate wins. This is an organization who likes to keep things under wraps.
11:11 There's no transparency among leadership and followership. There is unusual activities that some leaders aren't involved in because there, there's a question of integrity. So if you are in a culture, an organizational culture that doesn't see the good in others, this could be possibly why you don't see the good in your employees. Now, why I say this is because so much of our culture, organizational culture gets seeped into our unconscious mind, meaning it is unaware to you at the conscious level, which slips into the unconscious level of your mind where it becomes a program. Now, I worked for an organization for a very long time where the culture was extremely toxic. Every time I would try to advocate for one of my employees, HR or my leaders would shut me down. It was constant battling with them to show our worth. I mean, they were tying our self-worth with the compensation package.
12:18 And it was very frustrating for me to show all this evidence of an employee deserving a promotion and how they've impacted our department's bottom line and senior leadership and HR leadership would completely shut me down every time I try to raise the idea of a promotion for one of my people. And so this was the culture I tried to survive in and I defended and protected my employees from. So you may be in an organization where this is the culture, however it presents itself to you. You may be taking on at the unconscious level of your mind. And so I want for you to keep in mind that it is okay to feel the way you're feeling about your employees. And let me just normalize that before we move on, because so many of you, after speaking with me feel shame or guilt, and I don't want to shame or shade anybody on this episode.
13:21 I just want for you to just take a moment and realize that you have a choice in how you want to view or think about your employees. You get to choose to see the best in them, or you get to choose to see the worst in them. Now, here's what's interesting. When you don't see the good in your employees, your behavior is evident. Your behavior is what shows us that you don't believe in your employees, that you don't believe in their capacity or capabilities. You don't believe in their competencies or in their skills. You don't believe you don't have their back. In other words, because of this underlying thought that they're not good at anything, that you don't see the best in them because they don't show you the best. So you show up as a leader who doesn't see the best in her employees, your behaviors will tell you everything.
14:23 And if you are creating apathetic employees because of how you are treating them, then we have to stop and take a look at how we can reverse this, how we can change this mindset. Now, for some of you, you're going, wait a minute, this is just too much awareness. I'm not there yet. Okay, here's what I want you to ask yourself. If I had a parent or if I had a mom that constantly reminded me that I was crappy, she may not have said those words, but she treated me as such. Or if I had a dad who treated me like I was an idiot and would remind me through his actions every single day, how would I show up for my parents or for my family? Now, listen, this happened to me. I was a child with a lot of trauma and I flew under the radar.
15:19 And as I flew under the radar because I didn't want to draw attention to myself, I felt like my parents ignored me. They did not expect much from me in middle school and high school, or even in college. My parents just stayed away from me scholastically. I had an older sister who was a brainiac, like total genius. And I, because of all the trauma and interesting things that happened to me as a little girl, I just grew inward. I didn't grow outward. I just wanted to hide from the world. And as I created this little environment for myself in my mind, my parents, through their actions of not asking me about grades, not pushing me to excel, scholastically not pushing me to join clubs seriously, my parents completely ignored me during school. When I was in middle school and high school, my parents had zero expectations of me all the while they expected so much from my older sister.
16:23 But see, I created that and my parents just followed suit. So here I was not showing up and fulfilling their prophecy of, well, she's not going to amount to anything anyway, so we'll just leave her alone. But how about you? If you were raised in an environment where you were reminded that you weren't going to excel, and maybe it wasn't verbally, but maybe it was through their actions that told you that told your tiny little brain at that moment that you weren't fit to be anything more than a high school graduate, maybe not that there's anything wrong with that, but maybe your parents showed you through their behavior that they didn't believe in you, that they didn't have your back, that they didn't expect anything from you. Or some clients have had very explicit interactions with their parents and that they demanded perfection. They expected a plus plus work.
17:23 They expected for them to be the president of the United States. There was so much pressure, and so when you didn't meet their expectations, you weren't good enough. You were crap. You weren't meant for this role. You just aren't cut out for this. So I just want for you to ask yourself that. If I had a parent who reminded me through either their words or their actions that I was just not good enough and that there's nothing good in me, how would I show up? And so now turn your attention to how your employees may be showing up because they don't believe they have anything to offer the organization. Maybe they don't believe in themselves because perhaps your behaviors unconsciously or consciously has shown them that they're not enough. This is why leader, you are on the hook. You are on the hook to answer these very difficult questions.
18:22 These are the tough conversations that you and I get to have. And so I just want for you to keep in mind that when you see the worst in your employees, trust me, you are unconsciously showing up. Some of you may be super explicit, some of you may be very subtle, but know that if you keep showing up this way and not seeing the good in your employees, you will create an environment of poor morale. You're going to create uncommitted, disengaged employees. This is why we have quiet quitting. Just think about your experiences with your supervisors. I know I had a supervisor where I couldn't bring up any new ideas. I couldn't be smarter than him. I couldn't look smarter than him. I couldn't present innovative ideas. I could not be curious. Every time I would say something in our team meetings, he would pull me aside after and say, that just wasn't a very good look for you.
19:27 I'm just warning you. You could really look like a know-it-all, and I don't want for the others to feel dumb around you. So why don't you keep your comments to yourself unless I ask you to chime in? And I thought, oh, I don't want to make any of my teammates feel dumb. Didn't know. Not until years later when I processed all that crap. I'm like, what? It was him. He didn't want to look dumb when someone smarter than him presented a better idea. And so how about for you, leader? Think about times when your leader just didn't have the capacity to see the best in you. I mean, think about all those circumstances, all those times where there you were working your hardest, doing your best, but your leader was incapable of seeing the goodness in you. So this is the learnings that we're going to take from this episode is that if you are showing up, seeing the worst in your employees, it's time to take a step back and see what kind of mental work we have to do around this. And I'm your coach to do that with. It may be uncomfortable, but this is the work we must do as leaders because your employees are counting on you. All right, dear leader, I hope you found today's episode helpful. I know you did reach out wherever you are following
20:55 Me, either on LinkedIn, Facebook,
20:57 Maybe even YouTube. Want to hear from you. Let me know what insights you have taken from this episode. All right, dear Leader, I as your coach, see the greatness in you, and I am rooting for you every single day. All right, take good care. I'm looking forward to the next time we chat. Bye for now. Hey, leader,
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