Welcome to Visionary’s Pursuit, a podcast where we explore what it takes to turn your bold and inspiring ideas into reality. I'm Carolina Zuleta. I'm a life and business coach and your host for this podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here.
Hi, welcome back. This is episode 81 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast.
In the past few weeks, I've been talking with different people and I've had a conversation that kind of has repeated in different scenarios under different circumstances, but I've been thinking about it and it's made me feel actually quite sad.
And it's because I've met people who are incredibly smart, committed to their careers, who wanna continue growing, who wanna continue advancing, and who feel. Miserable at work. One of them even said, I go every day to work to breathe toxic air.
The other one told me, they have no belief or faith that there's actually a job in the United States that they could have where they could feel happy and fulfilled. And I think that's incredibly sad. And I do find that there are a lot of people in corporate America who are not very fulfilled at their jobs . They work for very toxic cultures where they don't feel valued or they don't feel heard or seen where they don't feel that they're given the resources, the space for them to thrive and do their best work.
So that got me curious to. See if those things that I'm seeing, like bigger corporations are also happening in small and medium businesses. And I found a study from the National Association for the Self-Employed that says that employees in smaller businesses and small businesses report higher levels of happiness that those in larger companies.
Specifically the difference in satisfaction was about 11 points higher on average. So employees of smaller businesses are 11 points higher satisfaction than employees from bigger corporations. Okay. Well, that's a good thing because if you're listening to this podcast, most likely you own your own business or you work for a small business.
And still the difference is not that big. 11 points. And then I went deeper to understand why.
An employee, be happier at a smaller business. And you know, there's several circumstances. They can be closer to the leaders of the companies. To the founders. Their work has more visibility, more impact. There's less bureaucracy, So there's all these benefits when you're working in a smaller environment. And yet I think there's room to grow because smaller businesses also struggle with employee satisfaction because maybe processes are not very clear.
Sometimes the founders are micromanaging or not managing time and resources well, so people feel very overwhelmed. Maybe their job descriptions are not very clear. Even though, you know, anyone who's working for a smaller company understands that their job might have a wide spectrum of responsibilities because that's the nature of working for a company that doesn't have 50,000 employees.
In fact, I would imagine that's what the attraction was in the first place. But the point I wanna make here is that us as business founders, as leaders, we are highly responsible for the environment, for the culture for the level of satisfaction of our employees. And that's what I wanna talk about. And I don't wanna talk about having happy employees. Happiness is an emotion that is very fleeting, that it's very personal, that it has to do with how we're thinking about a current moment or current situation.
I want us to go deeper in terms of, instead of thinking about happy employees, thinking about engaged employees. And the definition I like about employee engagement is one written by William Can in 1990 that says "employee engagement is a degree to which people bring their full selves physically, cognitively, and emotionally into their work." So you can think about employees bringing their effort, their energy showing up fully, being focused, being mentally present at what they're doing, caring for the work they're doing, feeling enthusiasm for the mission.
if we're gonna do a contrast between a disengaged employee and an engaged employee, I would say disengaged employees do the minimum required work, avoid taking responsibility, are emotionally detached from what they're doing every day from the mission of the company, from the other employees or the clients, and many of them are showing up just for the paycheck.
And I would in contrast say that an engaged employee is one that is taking ownership of their work without being asked. One of my clients, when we worked on the values of their company, one of the number one values was acting like an owner, acting like a business owner.
And I think it's true. It's like We want employees, especially in smaller companies that feel. Ownership for their work, for the results they're producing. Engage employees are also actively and proactively thinking about how they can improve things. How can they give better satisfaction to their clients? How can they minimize time in certain tasks? They feel highly connected to the mission. One of the beautiful things about hiring people for smaller companies is that usually it's the mission, the vision of the founder that's attracting that talent, and you wanna make sure that. They can stay connected to your mission and engaged employees are those that you will see bringing new ideas, initiatives, bringing energy, who don't mind working until late or working at a time that it's not the normal work hours, not because that's the rule, but because every now and then they feel so passionate and so committed to the work you're doing, that they'll do that without thinking, am I getting paid more or not?
as founders. As CEOs of our own companies, we need to keep. Employees highly engaged, especially when we have a small business, because you can think about it in a big corporation, if you have 50,000 employees and there's one who's not engaged, well, yeah, their work is not great, but it won't impact that much the total output of the company or the performance of the company. If you have 10 employees and one of them is disengaged, that means 10% of your workforce is disengaged. So when we are business founders, paying attention to our employees, making sure they are satisfied that they are engaged in the work is not just a nice to have. It's a core strategy for the success of our business.
You, the business founder, will have the biggest impact on the work culture.
when I've been invited to bigger corporations, and I'm talking in corporations that have between. 200 to a thousand employees and I've gone in there to do leadership workshops or to help also with employee engagement. One of the first places I always look at is how is that CEO leading? Because even at that level, when there's that many employees still that.
Impact of the CEO's leadership is fell through the entire organization, and that is for sure true. When you have, you know, 10, 50, a hundred, 200 employees, you as the business owner, carry the highest or the biggest responsibility for the engagement of all of your employees.
That's the first part. Second part is that although I do believe that some people are born with more natural abilities to lead, I don't think leadership is something that it's one and done. Leadership is an incredibly personal journey that we're never done, that we're never complete, that either we get better and better at it, or we get worse and worse at it.
There's no staying the same. You either work on your leadership and every day you become better at it or you don't work on your leadership and then your instincts, your unconscious behaviors are gonna make you a worse leader over time.
And the third part is that leadership is hard. As I've said in other episodes, for me, looking at the culture of a company, walking into a new business and understanding how it operates, it's like walking inside the brain of the founder or the CEO. On one hand, I'm gonna see that leaders best competencies, how they are leading from their vision, from their values, their ability to execute, to give good customer service, to treat others, right?
But I will also see the reactive tendencies and the reactive tendencies , which I'll talk about in more in a minute. Are our behaviors that we adopted when we were very little to protect ourselves, to survive in this world.
That if we haven't really looked at them, become aware of them, challenge them work to change them. They are behaviors that are gonna disrupt our culture. They're gonna disrupt the way we're leading and they're gonna have a negative impact on our employees. And reactive tendencies are things such as your perfectionism when you're arrogant and you think you know better than others, when you create distance from other people instead of.
Knowing how to be warm and close to to your employees when you are people pleasing, when you are wanting to make sure everyone is happy. And that's why it's so important to me to make the differentiation between happiness and engagement.
Because if we're wanting to make people happy, that means that many times we're going to people please and do things to make sure that they're not in discomfort. That in the longer term, or not even the longer term, but like in the next few weeks or months, you start creating a culture that is going to decrease your employee's engagement.
So let me slow it down because really where I wanna go today in this episode is to talk about three different types of reactive tendencies we have as leaders. Because I think this is my intro and my case as to why as business founders, but honestly as any person that is wanting to work or be a good human in the world, I think what I'm going to talk about next is incredibly important, but I wanted to make a case as why within smaller, medium businesses, being a great leader it's not just a nice to have or something that's admirable, but it's actually fundamental, imperative for a business to be successful. So the next part of this episode, what I wanna do is go into three different types of reactive tendencies.
To say it again. Our reactive tendencies are these behaviors we learned when we were very young. There were the ways our new brains when we're four or five, six years old figured out on how to cope with the world around us.
We learned these strategies and they were brilliant when we were young, and in many ways they are still incredibly powerful. As adults. The problem is that we start overusing them and then in the overuse we start making mistakes.
I wanna mention, the language I'm using in this episode, meaning the reactive tendencies, comes from the Leadership Circle profile. The Leadership Circle profile is a tool I use with my private clients in which we assess their leadership by doing a 360 with the people that they work with. It gives us a map on how my client's leadership effectiveness is at a determined moment, which is right now when we're doing the assessment.
So full credit to the Leadership circle profile for this language. I think it is fantastic. And by the way, you can go to their website and you can do a self-assessment if you want. If you want the full profile, like including the 360 and all that, you do need a coach, someone to do it, and it's part of what I include in my one-on-one coaching program.
like I was saying, our reactive tendencies are those behaviors we learned right when we were very little, to survive our world. So they're divided in three different categories. The first category is complying. Are those behaviors that we adopted, not to stir the pot, to keep harmony, to stay, you know, in a way that it's peaceful or like at least superficially peaceful.
And I think we could all probably imagine when you are six or seven or even younger, and you wanna make sure that you are staying in connection with your parents or with your caregivers, right? It is so scary when you're a little child, especially when you don't feel safe or where there's not safety in the house. For you to fully express your disagreement or your big emotions. You are going to learn a way to manage the situation to, to manage other people so you know you're in connection with them and you're not gonna die because for a little child, if you are not staying close to the people who are taking care of you, that really, really, very literally can mean death.
So people who are compliant have certain behaviors. They tend to be more people pleasing, they have a harder time having difficult conversations or bringing up topics that are gonna create disagreement. But there are the people in the office that everyone loves because they're saying yes to everything.
They're willing to, protect the time of their employees and do extra work during the weekend so their employees are happy or to agree to things, not necessarily because they're the best strategy, but it's because what everyone wants. And in many ways that is really is a great strategy as well because you are accepted by your employees, you are loved.
And that's a beautiful thing. Now the problem is when your desire to keep things quote unquote peaceful or safe, you are avoiding changing policies, changing procedures, doing things in a different way, having difficult conversations, giving tough feedback, letting go of employees who are not performing
then what that happens is, as you can see, that starts deteriorating the culture of your company. I have a client who, we've had many conversations about her manager, her boss, and what's happened is that her boss will often say yes to her, will praise her, but then she will find out through the grapevine that her boss has not.
Fully approve of what she did or is not saying the same thing to others that's saying to her, and that has created some mistrust or actually deep mistrust. And I don't think it's because her boss is a bad person, but I think it's her boss is probably not aware of their desire to people please to make everyone happy.
And because they're trying to do that, they're not seeing that it's eroding trust with. Everyone because they don't know what they're saying if it's really the truth or are they just saying this to make us happy? So one of the, reactive tendencies we need to pay attention to is the part of us that wants to comply.
The part of want us that wants to create, safety or that everyone is happy and that we're not rocking the boat and things are staying the same. The other reactive tendency is, a little bit the opposite is the protecting one. So this we also learned when we were very young, and these are behaviors.
For example, being like I can do this on my own, I don't need help. I can do better than other people. Even when you know that your team is incredible, but there's still this belief that if you do it, you'll do it better. Of course we all have all of these reactive tendencies at some level because we're human beings.
But I know for me, this part of doing it on my own has been a strong one. In fact, I had a mentor many years ago who told me, Kara, you know, what is your mantra for life alone and on your own? And I was so shocked when he said that.
I was like, what do you mean? But then throughout the years, hearing those things, taking them in and seeing how they actually play out in your life, in your leadership, started realizing that in those moments when things feel chaotic, when things feel stressful to me, my tendency is to take control, to stop delegating, to do it all on my own, to be the one who is micromanaging taking responsibilities from other people's plates and doing it by myself because. At some point in my childhood, I probably learned that if I did it on my own, if I didn't depend on others, if I didn't ask for help, I felt safe. And I'm highlighting this one because I have heard a lot of other founders and business owners that feel this same, this same pattern.
In protecting there's also the part of us that creates distance. So we're not showing vulnerability. We're not really opening our hearts to feel empathy. And an example of this, I was coaching, an executive of a, of a smaller, well, medium sized business, and she had to let go some employees and. She was telling me that she was kind of shocked a little bit about how she wasn't feeling that sad, right?
That incredible amount of pain that she had felt when she was, you know, new in her career and she had to let go of her first employee after we coach a little bit about it, we figured out that she was protecting herself by not feeling, and although it makes sense, right? When you're a leader, sometimes you have to make really tough choices that you know are gonna hurt other people that are gonna, put someone out of a job and you know, those are very tough choices.
So our protecting self can come up and we can create that distance. My coaching to her is how can we be leaders that don't have to disconnect from our empathy? How can we be leaders that can make a tough choice, experience, the pain of it, and get to the other side?
Because I believe that when as leaders, we start creating that distance, we start protecting our hearts from the pain that comes with tough decisions. Then imagine what is the impact on our employees? They're not gonna feel our care. They're not gonna feel our commitment. They're not gonna feel our warmth, and that's gonna, of course. Lower levels of engagement. Plus listen, we are human beings. It's not just about business performance, but it's because we're all here and I think being able to be leaders that have big hearts in which we have empathy in which we can feel and not be afraid of. That feeling makes us all more human and create simply a better world for everyone.
And the third strategy we use to protect ourselves is to be critical. And it's when we become sarcastic or cynical, when we're critical towards others or when we give feedback in a way that is so harsh. People can get hurt because of our feedback, but there's a way of doing it in which we're saying in integrity with our values.
And there is a way of doing it that we're just putting people down. And what I want to tell you is if you are finding yourself either in the, you know. Arrogant, which means you know it all. You are self-centered. You think you do it better than everyone or in the critical or in the person who's creating that emotional distance.
I want to say that it's not that you are a bad person. You need to remember that these are strategies you created when you're very young and that have served you and the ways that have served you is you're self-sufficient. You're not afraid of conflict. You can give feedback, you can have difficult conversations, and all of those things are super important for, for being a good leader.
But it is also the overuse of those that ends up having a negative impact on the effectiveness of your leadership.
And the last reactive tendency I wanna talk about today is controlling. And controlling some of the behaviors we'll see when we're operating from our controlling self is perfectionism. We want everything to be done perfectly. We're very hard on ourselves. We need to excel in every situation. We have extremely high standards for ourselves and for others. And I'm not talking about having just high standards.
High standards are beautiful, and very important. But when our standards become impossible to achieve. That's when we know we're moving into perfectionism and that we're moving into perfectionism because we're scared of failing. As Brenna Brown says, perfectionism is the 20 ton shield, meaning it's the shield we put on to protect ourselves.
And the lie of perfectionism is that we believe that if we do everything perfectly, that if we are perfect, then we will not suffer. But really perfectionism itself is creating suffering. another strategy under controlling is working excessively hard. It's pushing ourselves hard. It's becoming a workaholic. Again, if you think about, it's because we think if we work hard, hard, hard and we never stop and we push ourselves, then we're gonna be safe.
But that's, as we've talked about it in other episodes, that's not necessarily true. In controlling. We also think about. I'm right and things have to go my way and I'm gonna control other people and I'm gonna tell them exactly how they need to do their things, and I'm gonna dictate what they need to do rather than influence them.
And the last strategy under controlling is, you know, winning is what matters. So we're gonna go for winning on top of everything, no matter the results, no matter how people are feeling in my company, no matter if everyone is feeling overworked, no matter what's happening, I am driven by profit or revenue, or raising the next round of capital.
So, again, it's not that we are bad human beings. I really wanna make sure that we know this because if you look at those behaviors of controlling, working hard, striving for excellence, you know, guiding other people, that's what creates really excellent results. That's what creates people who are outstanding, the problem is the overuse. The problem is when we are just pursuing results and perfectionism. That affects our ability to lead because leadership is a balance between our connection to people, bringing people along and achieving results. And when we're just about achieving things no matter what, and making them perfect. We're gonna lose engagement from our employees. So listen, there's a couple of things that are very important. The first thing is that this reactive tendencies, complying, protecting, controlling, are not if you have them or not.
We all have them, some of us at higher levels than others. But all of us at some point have these tendencies because we're human beings.
The second is to understand that these tendencies come because we adopted them when we were very young and they made sense back then, but the third thing, and I think the most important is where I started this episode today, is that you as.
Have to take ownership and responsibility for paying attention, becoming aware of these behaviors, allowing other people to speak into your leadership because you have blind spots. You and I, we all have blind spots because we're living inside our heads and many times we're unaware of the impact behaviors that for us, felt very natural are having on our teams and the people around us.
And if you want a business to be successful, I would imagine that if you're listening to this podcast, you also care about your employees and your teams. You need to pay attention to yourself. You need to pay attention to your beliefs. To your actions, how you process your emotions, what you believe about others, how are you influenced, how are you navigating your relationships with the people inside your company?
Leadership for a business founder is not optional. It's a core fundamental strategy, and you either get better at leadership by doing this deep introspective work, knowing when your reactive tendencies are showing up and learning how to manage them. Or you don't. And these reactive tendencies, they don't stay the same.
They tend to get bigger and bigger, and you become more controlling, more perfectionist, more distant, more arrogant, and that ends up hurting your workforce and ultimately you as well. Because when we are in this reactive tendencies, we start disconnecting from other people and we may not feel it when we're very busy and we're task oriented and we're on to the next thing.
I bet that in those moments of silence, when we feel the anxiety, when we feel the depression, is because that part of us that is very human, that wants to stay connected, that wants to do good in the world, is trying to tell us that we have, taken the other path and we need to go back to ourselves.
And this is a work that I absolutely love doing. Using the Leadership Circle profile with my clients has given us a depth of understanding that I think it's incredibly valuable. And to see my clients not only like, yes, becoming aware, sometimes it's a little bit painful. I'm not gonna deny it for me too.
When I first started becoming aware of these tendencies, I was like, ouch. I'm like that. I thought I was a better human being. But when we navigate that, and we actually understand that the best tool to navigate these reactive tendencies is to grow compassion towards ourself and to see ourselves as human beings with all these beautiful things, but also with our own insecurities and challenges, and we can embrace it all.
We not only become better leaders, but our lives become more meaningful. Our lives become more fulfilled. Our relationship with our loved ones becomes. More enriched. And this is why my work with my clients who allow me to speak into their lives, to look at their leadership, is so fulfilling because it's when I feel like we're all really connected and it's not just about the profit and the goals, which I also love, but it's about our humanity and living a more meaningful, more connected life. So if any of you business founders, you're listening to this and you're having.
Challenges with the engagement of your team or you feeling that an over responsibility to make everyone happy, or you're finding yourself staying quiet when you know you had to speak up or you're facing the frustration when people are not following you and you've already told them what they need to do and they're not doing it.
I'm gonna say this very straightforward. That's a you problem. That's a, you as a founder, as the leader problem. And there's a beautiful journey you can start walking through where you're gonna find solutions that are not just simple tactics that you're gonna read in a book, but that you're gonna find them by going within yourself and getting to know yourself better.
And I'll be. Happy and enormously honored to be your partner in this journey. So if you are interested in coaching with me, book a call with me, the link is here in the description and I'll tell you all about it. And also if you like this episode, please Sure to rate the podcast, it really goes a long way. It takes you two seconds. But for us that we're working every week to bring content to you that is meaningful and valuable is very, very important to us. It goes a long way.
And so this episode doesn't just become spiritual entertainment. Spiritual entertainment for me is when we read or we learn about really powerful concepts and we do nothing with them, I invite you to take some action. You can do it by sitting down and reflecting and journaling. Are you more complying? Are you more controlling? Are you more protecting or to even take the risk and ask people around you to give you some feedback or go to the leadership circle profile and take, your own assessment and increase your awareness of those reactive tendencies that might be getting in the way of you being the leader that I know you wanna be.
All right, my friends. So great to be with all of you and I'll see you next time. Bye.
If you're currently pursuing a big, bold idea and would love some support, let's talk. In my coaching program, I'll teach you how to manage yourself, your own thoughts and emotions. as well as your team and your money so you can turn your beautiful idea into a reality. Go now to carozuleta.com slash consult that is c a r o z u l e t a dot com slash consult and complete the form to book a complimentary call with me.
See you there!
