Leadership isn't about what you do. It's how you show up in the moments that matter. How you respond, how you engage, and what your team learns from you when pressure hits. All of that is coming up next.
Welcome to The Chris LoCurto Show, where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are.
Welcome to the show, folks. I hope you're having a fabulous day wherever you are.
Today we are talking about one of the hardest things for leaders to realize, and it is this. You can be fully committed to your business and still unintentionally create distance with your team. It happens all the time.
Not because you're a bad leader, not because you don't care, but because stress changes how we show up.
And we get rushed, we get distracted, we start carrying everything ourselves, and little by little, you become mentally unavailable while physically present.
Now, you're probably starting to think I agree with them. I think I've been there. So over time, the business begins revolving around our reactions instead of healthy leadership.
So in this episode, I want to walk through a healthier way forward. So these are four questions that I get from time to time.
1. Are people experiencing me as calm… or constantly rushed? (00:01:28)
So let's kind of hit the first one here. Are people experiencing me as calm or constantly rushed?
Sometimes people will ask this. Sometimes people don't actually want to know the answer to this.
What I need you to understand is that, yes, I know you probably have a team member or two on your team that just wants to occupy a lot of your time, wants to ask you a lot of questions, wants to stop you every, you know, three minutes and engage and have conversation on things.
And we call that, you know, death by a thousand slashes.
That's not the thing that we're talking about today. We are talking about when you find yourself, you know, moving quickly from one thing to the next.
You know, let's say a team member asks you a question, and even though you answer them, you find that your attention really isn't on answering them. So what does that look like?
What should you be doing? Well, instead, what we have to realize is, yes, there are going to be times we're just busy. Yes, it is okay that you have things going on and things to do, all of that stuff, but that should not be the norm.
That shouldn't be something that people experience all the time. What we've got to do is recognize that if we don't spend quality time with our team members, even in just a small period of time, then we come across as somebody who's too busy.
Somebody who, you know, the team isn't a priority. We're just mentally unavailable. Even though we're physically there. What we need to do is we need to slow down a little bit, right?
When we're. When a team member is coming to us or somebody's asking us a question, then we need to remember that that question isn't about wasting time. It's not just a silly question. If it is, then we need to guide and direct, right?
We need to do something differently. What we should be focusing on is that this is a time for us to help somebody. I'm not saying you need to answer every question that comes your way.
You know, a better way would be helping them to solve the problem, but if our mind is somewhere else, then we're not going to help them to solve the problem anyways. It doesn't even matter.
So before responding, just pause for a second. You know, put distractions down. If you're digging in and gaining perspective by asking questions, ask another question, Ask one more, right?
Spend a little bit of time making sure that you're doing the best you can to help this person stay in the conversation a little longer than you normally would. I know many times we're like, hey, I've got to get going.
I've got to do something. And once again, caveat here is that I'm not talking about wasted conversations. I'm talking about team member really needs something or needs your attention on something, then make sure that you're engaging.
Well, even the small moments of intentional presence are going to change how your team experiences you. Now, why does it work? Well, because your emotional pace becomes the emotional pace of the team.
If you haven't realized that if your pace is fast and chaotic, your team's is going to be as well, right? So when leadership constantly feels rushed, teams become anxious, they become hesitant, they become reactive.
But when leadership feels grounded and present, then communication gets healthier and healthier and people will engage more and openly. So remember this the next time you're feeling rushed and somebody's trying to get with you.
Talk to you, ask you a question, get some guidance on something, think through this process. If again, you have somebody who's just wasting your time and death by a thousand slashes, you have to have a tough conversation.
It doesn't even have to be a tough conversation. You can just have a conversation of, hey, why don't we do this? I notice you have a ton of questions. Every handful of minutes.
Write them all down. Set an appointment with me this afternoon. We'll go through them all. What you will find is they will have very few questions at the end of the day because they will have answered everything.
And chances are they really just wanted to spend some time with you.
2. Am I helping my team think… or accidentally training them to wait? (00:05:33)
Number two, am I helping my team think or accidentally training them to wait? That's such a great question.
A problem shows up and you already know the answer, right? Somebody comes to you, they ask you a question, there's a situation, you know how to handle it, and unfortunately, you jump in quickly to help.
Now, Chris, how could that be unfortunate? Isn't that exactly what I'm supposed to do as a leader? No, I understand. It feels efficient. It feels like the right thing to do.
But eventually what you're training that team member, and if it's in the first 90 days of somebody's employment, I don't have a problem with that.
But eventually what you're doing is you're training that team member to stop thinking the problems through until they get to an answer or any answer or multiple answers, right?
They stop thinking because they know if they will just go to leadership, leadership's gonna take over anyways. Now, most people have good intentions with this, but you'll even find some people are just lazy.
They just realize they could get you to do it, so they're just going to come to you and get you to answer.
So what do you do? Stay in this process long enough to help your team think instead of immediately rescuing the situation. Ask questions instead of solving.
Ask questions. What are you seeing? What have you tried? What do you think the next step should be? Give me some ideas on possible solutions.
There's a whole ton of stuff that you can ask and, and guide the conversation instead of jumping in and controlling the outcome too early by doing so.
This is the reason why this works. People will actually grow when they learn how to think through problems, right? Not when they're constantly handed answers.
Their brain starts to go, oh, my gosh, well, he's not going to answer this for me. I've got to come up with something. And usually what I'll do is I'll tell people, hey, come back to me with three answers.
You know, go spend 20 minutes and come back to me with three possible answers.
And even if they just come back with one, I'm pretty happy with that. And it's something I can start with. I can start training. By doing this, you create ownership questions create ownership with the team member.
They know it's coming. They know what to expect if you continue this. If you do this correctly on a continuous basis and stop answering everything. Then they will discover if I come to Chris, I have to have some answers.
Because really what I'm looking for is I'm looking for somebody to be able to process through, come up with an answer to so that they can think for themselves.
And by the time they get to me, they're not even asking for my answer. They're saying, hey, here's the direction I'm thinking of going in. Do you approve? And I'm good with that. So constant rescuing absolutely creates dependency. Don't do it.
3. Have I become so task-focused that people mostly experience my pressure? (00:08:28)
Number three, have I become so task focused that people mostly experience my pressure? Great, great question. You're carrying a lot. You're a business owner, you're a business leader, you're carrying a lot.
You're solving issues, you're moving fast, you've got, you're probably juggling a bunch of decisions. You probably have a good number of conversations going on.
You've got messages to check, emails to check, phone calls to check. You're trying to keep everything moving in the right direction.
You know, you've got stuff on your list, your to do list that you just can't get to it. Well, if you're prioritizing correctly, there's probably some things you're like, man, I'd still like to get to that, but it's not top priority.
All of this stuff, even though you care deeply about your team, even though you care deeply about the business, what happens is when you interact with people, you feel to those that you're interacting with, it feels like it's just hurried and very transactional.
You've got to shift your focus from managing pressure items or pressure things or pressure moments and situations and decisions and all that kind of stuff to leading people through pressure.
You see, you have a phenomenal opportunity to help them. See you model what it's like to work through pressure, how to deal with pressure, how to solve pressure, how to. Right.
And at the end of the day, if it doesn't start with you, how is it ever going to translate to them?
So some of the things you need to do personally, you know, you get to the end of the day and you ask the ridiculous question, what in the world did I get done today?
It's, you know, if you're asking that question and you don't have the answer, well, you're probably running way too hard, right? Start asking, did I actually lead my team today?
How, how much time, not just having conversations, but legitimate leading, helping them, making them more successful.
How much time did I spend today? The average answer that I have heard from people is five minutes. That is a common thing that I hear from somebody.
Keep in mind you get paid to lead most of the time. You know, ask questions like, did people experience clarity from me today? Did I rush things and it made it difficult for them? Did I create calm or more stress?
Now that's a tough one because some people believe that creating stress creates productivity. You've probably come out of an environment like that before.
I know I did. I came out of very high pressure stuff back in the day. And the concept was if, if you weren't running 90 to nothing, you probably weren't doing enough.
And I will tell you, the more pressure you create, especially with different personality styles, the slower the productivity becomes.
Because pressure does not equate to better and faster productivity. In fact, it creates more problems, it creates more fires. It creates people jumping from double checking to quadruple checking their work, which slows them down.
All kinds of junk happens. So understand that leadership is not measured by how exhausted you are at the end of the day. It just isn't. That doesn't mean that you've done a phenomenal job leading.
What it probably means is you did a phenomenal job getting 14,000 things done today that you probably should be paying somebody else to do instead of you. Right?
So understand your greatest value is not how many things you can carry, it never will be. That should be more on a team member who's paid to do specific things and not paid to lead. Right. So your value is how well you guide people forward.
How will you lead people to success? So when leaders stay trapped in this constant task saturation process, this overwhelm, then the team, the entire team eventually feels it.
And they feel like the most important thing is to be doing as many possible tasks, no matter how focused you are on them, no matter how well they get done, it's just do a lot of stuff.
4. What are people learning from the way I handle pressure? (00:12:43)
So number four, what are people learning from the way I handle pressure?
Again, another great question. A stressful situation. Let's just say one hits the business and everyone just kind of looks to leadership to figure out how in the world is leadership going to handle it.
How serious is this? You know, I've had that so many times over my decades of leading people and leaders and business owners, whenever something goes crazy, it is almost like you can feel the eyeballs shift straight to you in the room.
Right? It's nuts. Everybody looks to see how are you going to handle it? How are you going to respond? Well, are you going to panic? Are you going to stay steady?
Are you going to be calm? Are you going to freak out? Are you going to push pressure on everybody else? I have watched so many bad leaders go ballistic and freak out and push pressure. We have a saying around our office, when you freak, you freeze.
That type of response to pressure causes people to freeze. It does not cause them to be productive and go crazy.
When you freak, you freeze. And most leaders don't realize how much their reactions shape the emotional environment of the team. The team's going to respond.
If you're going to freak, then they feel like they have to freak. So what do you do? Well, become intentional. Think about what are the attitudes and behaviors you want to model when under pressure.
I will tell you, I did not know this until it was pointed out to me years and years and years ago that when pressure came up, I usually handled it with a whole lot of calm.
One thing I know is if I freak out, I can't think. So I just don't. I'm like, there's a problem, all right, solve it. How do we solve the problem? Go straight to solving the problem.
And, you know, there's an old military term, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Sometimes we think panic is fast. It is not smooth is fast. Slow down, do it smoothly, get it done.
And you will be amazed at how much faster you solve the problem, especially under pressure. Right. Hold on. Find out what's going on. You know, it's like, you know, if you hear. What is it you hear, a lion somewhere coming after you.
Don't run until you know which direction it's coming from because you might be running straight at it. Same kind of concept. Find out what's going on.
What do I need to change? How do I need to handle this? What do you do? Well, start focusing on things like your tone, your pace, your reactions. Right.
How do you communicate during stressful moments? Are you communicating with calm? Are you helping people not to freak out?
A common thing that I will say, you know, from time to time. I say, from time to time. It's probably once in a great while when I do see somebody freaking out is I will stop and I'll go, hey, you're freaking out.
Well, yeah, such and such. This thing's, you know, we got to solve the thing. Hey, is your freaking out actually solving the problem? And I cannot tell you how many times somebody will stop and go, no.
Okay, then stop. There's no need to freak out. You don't have to pretend things are perfect. You don't have to act as though you're not stressed out as well.
But if you lead people through pressure, instead of spreading pressure, you, you'll be amazed at how it will change the culture and then everybody will be able to respond better, especially when the pressure is on them.
Teams are going to absorb how leadership behaves. Doesn't matter, it's just going to happen.
So if leadership becomes reactive, if leadership becomes tense, if they become emotionally unavailable, then the culture starts to reflect exactly that.
But come calm, intentional leaders, that creates a much healthier response. It helps people to communicate healthier, it helps people to deal with conflict in a healthier way.
It even helps people to take more ownership. A lot of times with heavy duty pressure, if people freak out, you will find certain personality styles will give up ownership of something that they own.
That's something that they're responsible for because they don't want to deal with it and they don't want to see the, the negative effects of it.
A Challenge For You (00:17:12)
So here's something I want you to focus on this week. Choose one conversation where you normally feel rushed. You can probably, you probably already know what your week is going to look like.
And you know in certain situations, you're going to find yourself feeling really rushed in a conversation.
Slow down, stay present, ask just one more question, just give it a try and don't immediately solve any problems. Do some perspective gathering and try and help people to solve on their own.
Especially if it's about solving problems, right? But slow down. No matter what it is, just pay attention to what changes. Watch people.
And again, you know, if this is the first time you're doing this, what you may find is some people may panic because they don't have the answer.
That's okay, work through it. But as you do this, you're going to find that they will actually start solving stuff on their own.
Now, if you want to go deeper into real leadership situations, what's actually happening, and exactly how to respond, we break these down regularly.
So follow along on Instagram @chrislocurto to see how this plays out in everyday leadership moments.
Again, folks, leadership isn't about being everywhere.
It's about how people experience you when you are there. And small shifts in how you show up can completely change the health of your team. It can change your culture, it can change your business.
So slow down, be there, be present, respond properly. Well, that is all the time that we have for today. I hope we have helped you with this information.
As always, take this information, Change your leadership, change your business, change your life, and join us on the next episode.
