Protecting Confidence Through Consistent Leadership

“For your high performers, thinking they’re not doing good enough is the last thing you want. Because it is not true.” -Annie

Leadership is Calling presents, Ten Years in Ten Minutes with Annie Hyman Pratt, a new limited series! In this premiere episode, Annie talks about the importance of maintaining not only your own confidence as a leader, but also the confidence of your team.

Leaders must protect their team’s confidence, not just their own. Don’t let your emotional pain spill into team interactions. Recognize when you feel triggered and regulate your emotions first before talking to your team.

Key Points

• Leaders must protect their team’s confidence, not just their own.
• Don’t let your emotional pain spill into your team interactions.
• Recognize when you feel triggered and regulate your emotions first.
• Your team already feels bad about poor results, don’t add to it.
• Ask yourself if there are better people out there than your top performers.

Related Resources

More Information: Self-Leadership
Articles: Expanding The Zone of Emotional Endurance |  PROTECT Your Confidence to MAINTAIN Team Confidence
Downloadable Leadership Tool: The CCORE Empowerment Process

Auto-Generated Transcript – unedited version

Protecting Confidence Through Consistent Leadership

Most entrepreneurs have heard the phrase “protect your confidence.” And when they hear it, they really understand what that means. Right? It’s like, when you think about it, if you’re an entrepreneur and you can’t show up in a good, confident place of, you know, “I’m able to make this business succeed,” you’re going to go nowhere. And when you can’t get to that place, you know an entrepreneur doesn’t have the motivation or even the thinking ability to make their business thrive and succeed.

So that’s a given. What entrepreneurs don’t often think about is that they also need to protect the confidence of their team. This is something that I think really does take most leaders 10 years at least to fully understand. So I’m going to explain it as fast as I can and talk about, you know, what an entrepreneur or senior leader is – really it’s anybody who’s going to rely on a team to produce results – those leaders need to know how to protect their team’s confidence.

And the number one way to do that is to not have your emotions, the leader’s emotional pain, spill into the team. That means that, you know, if you’re resentful, if you’re frustrated, if you um are a bit fearful, if you have a lot of anxiety going about what’s happening in the business, which today is so common – we are in a time where business is super hard for almost every business right now, super hard. Okay? And everybody knows that it’s hard. Everybody, all the team can see that the results aren’t what they’re supposed to be.

So an entrepreneur might be, you know, might come into a meeting a bit fearful, maybe frustrated that things aren’t going better than they’re going, and maybe even thinking, “Hey, if I, if the team really understands how painful this is for me, then maybe they’ll work harder.” You know, maybe they’ll get extra motivated. So maybe it’s even like, “Okay if I’m, you know, well if I’m short or snippy, or maybe even make some sarcastic comments or something, you know that maybe the team will be extra motivated then.” Maybe I’ll just shake them up a little bit and get them extra motivated to, you know, to do something good.

Okay, so what I want you to know is that backfires. That your team, especially the highest performers on the team, already feel terrible. They may not be showing it. In fact, they are going to do their best to not show it, to show up in a good place, sort of ready to work, ready to listen, wanting to do something really good. But they feel terrible about the results too.

And so if you come in and you um blame or criticize or judge, or you’re in a super anxious place and have the team feeling – having the team feeling like “Oh my gosh, not only are the results going badly, but this is really, you know I’m personally messing up my CEO.” Like “I’m personally causing pain,” that’s where they go. That’s where they go. They’re like, “My performance isn’t good enough to, you know, remove the pain from my entrepreneur.”

They um, they right away go to the place of “I don’t think I’m a fit anymore here.” Literally they have an extremely hard time not seeing, um, a CEO or an entrepreneur’s words as having meaning, when I know it’s just emotion coming out. But they literally are taking those words and thinking, “I’m messing up. I’m doing it wrong.” And for your high performers, that’s the last thing you want. Because it’s not true.

The truth is they’re doing everything they can do to make it better. And if in that moment they think they’re not doing good enough, they – all the doubts creep in and they go to the place of like “Maybe I’m not the right person anymore. Maybe somebody else could do this better than me.”

And I want you to take a moment right now and think about your best performers. And think about, really, is there a bunch of people out there who can do better than them? Because I’m, you know, I’m a hundred percent certain that’s not true. And that you would be devastated if you lost, you know, lost your best performers because you couldn’t get a handle on your own emotions.

So how do you get a handle on your own emotions? That’s the thing that I really want everybody to, you know, gain from this video.

The very, very first thing is to recognize when you’re emotional, when you’re emotionally reactive, when you’re a bit triggered – to recognize “I’m in a place where I’m pretty anxious. I can already feel that I am, you know, sort of perceiving my team as, um, as as not capable or as, you know I have a lot of anxiety running about how this is going to go.”

We want you to recognize that first. Recognize because then your mind can say “Pause, wait a minute. We need to get out of this space before we talk to the team.” And you can – the way to get out of this space before talking to the team – you have a few different ways to regulate emotions.

Take a bunch of deep breaths. Um, walk around the block. Call a friend. Call a colleague. Call your therapist. Talk to somebody who’s not involved – somebody who is not, um, how would I say, you know, is not in this race with you. Somebody who has perspective. Somebody who can see things much more clearly because they’re not in this business with you. That’s who you need to talk to to regulate your emotions. So important.

That’s why so many entrepreneurs have masterminds. Use them. Call people. And once you get your emotions regulated, then you can come in and talk to the team about “What can we really do here?” Because what you want your team focused on is not you. If they’re thinking “Oh no, I wonder if my, how my entrepreneur is doing. I wonder if they’re, you know, if they’re going to be, if they’re upset, if they’re in a bad place,” the more they’re thinking about the entrepreneur or the CEO, the less they’re thinking about “What I should do to get the results we want.”

We want them focused on what’s going to work here. And we want them to have the presumption to know, solidly, that you’re confident in them.

And I, you know, maybe the, the last thing that I’ll share here is that, most everyone has had the experience of trying to work with somebody – maybe it was on a sports team or in a job, work with a, you know, a coach or a boss – that was not confident in them. The kind that thought of them as like “You, you know, you’re, you’re you mess up all the time. Like you’re not, this is, you’re, you know, you’re not, you’re not good at this.”

It’s almost impossible to perform in that state. It’s almost impossible. So I want you to think about a time that you’ve had like that, so that you can more quickly recognize when you are about to show up with your team in a place that’s going to destroy their confidence. During a time, that’s the last time you want to destroy their confidence. This is the time you need your best team members to perform their best, not go to the place of “Wow, maybe there’s somebody out there who could actually, you know, get the results right now.”

Guess what? There isn’t. Everybody’s having a hard time. This is going to take a bit of time to figure out. And you need your best people to be really confident doing it.

So that’s what I wanted to share with you today. That will make a huge difference in your leadership, to learn more about this episode’s topic. Pick up a copy of my book “The People Part”.