In my last episode, I had a great conversation with Jose Bordetas. We talked about how leadership without pretending is about choosing substance over optics and integrity over approval. Sometimes you're doing all the right things, saying the right words and playing the part, and something still feels off. We explored what it's like for leaders who don't want to perform as if they have confidence, borrow someone else's leadership style, or pretend they believe in systems that quietly drain people. Hi, I'm Becky. Welcome to Short Story Long. In this podcast, we discuss ways you can integrate who you are into how you lead. Today I am offering strategies for building your skills as a leader. Let's break down what's important as you build balance for yourself as a leader. One of the themes that kept surfacing in my conversation with Jose was the difference between confidence and performance. He talked about learning to trust his capability without needing to prove it, and how that line between confident and cocky is something leaders have to manage deliberately. When confidence is grounded in competence, it becomes stabilizing rather than performative. Another thread in our conversation was precision in communication. Jose was clear that leadership isn't about saying more, it's about saying what matters to the person in front of you. Communicating with intention and respect for context is one of the clearest signals of maturity in a leader. And it's often where trust is either built or quietly eroded. What ties this together is leading people as individuals rather than as roles or averages across the team. Leadership without pretending requires paying attention to how different people are motivated, challenged, and supported. The shift is from applying the same approach to everyone to exercising judgment for the best outcome for an individual contributing to the group. If you feel trapped as a leader, there are a few things you might try to release the burden and find the appealing sides of leadership. Yes, it can be hard, but there are positives and negatives to anything, and that includes leadership. When we really think about this idea of balancing the difference between confidence and being a little bit cocky or arrogant about what our capabilities can be, Jose had talked about don't tell people that you're great. He talked about letting them tell you that you're great. And this matters because sometimes we feel like we have to present ourselves as super confident, and we actually feel a bit fragile. And so we start to feel like an imposter instead of quote unquote a real leader. And confidence is actually earned through the capability and the follow-through. And that's what actually holds up under pressure. Confidence isn't gotten before you take the action, it's when you take action that you generally start to feel that confidence start to build up. One of the things that I think about regularly is this idea of letting the work speak. And there is a big balance in this kind of approach because, on one hand, you could be doing amazing work and it's not saying much because no one is actually aware that you're doing the work. And yet on the flip side, you pull out that bullhorn and you're saying, hey, I'm awesome, I'm wonderful. And people are instead starting to think, well, why does she have to say how awesome she is? What's she not doing that she's trying to cover up? And it almost creates the inverse of what you want, it creates suspicion. The idea here is to raise the awareness of people in terms of what you're doing. And instead of telling people how great you are, it's showing and expressing the outcomes and the process through which you are doing some of these things and giving them the space to talk about, hey, wow, that's a really amazing achievement. There are moments that I have gone in and I thought, this is such a small thing. I can't believe that I'm actually trying to present this as some sort of insight for someone. And it's an ironic kind of thing how those are sometimes the moments when people will say to me, Wow, that was really fantastic. That was really an amazing experience for me. And I'm stuck on my heels thinking, wow, that was the thing. That that was the one. What's amazing about that is we're often so deeply in our strengths at that point in time that we don't realize how amazing it is for someone who doesn't have that strength. For us, it's quiet and it's repeatable, just like the confidence to keep going and keep on trying some of the different things we're trying to do. It comes from doing the work, learning what you don't know and letting those results speak for themselves, where you're talking about this is what happened, this is how it showed up, but you're not doing the whole bells and whistles of because I'm so awesome. And really, what you want to be able to do is express the process and the capability and let them see the outcome and the value of the outcome. Because as soon as you try to guess what is amazing for someone else, maybe you're running into the experience that I do, is when you think it's the least of your effort, is when you get the greatest of response. And this ties into actually another thing that Jose and I talked about, which is that idea of tying your communications to the person that you're talking to. It's about precision and direction. And he talked about how you need to learn how to speak to an audience. His reference was about a CEO doesn't have time. So you have to give them the five-minute version. And that's quite frankly, if you even get the five minutes. You get the amount of time to go up the elevator to be able to share your point. When we're using generic communication, it's actually a form of pretending that we know something that we really don't know. When we really know and understand something, it's a deeper skill to be able to teach and to share that with someone else. That takes a precision and a depth of knowledge that a generic conversation can never cover. It's that space where you can synthesize that context down to a couple of words, phrases, or sentences, and you can cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time. And when you have an audience that you don't get a lot of airtime with, you want to be able to compress that information. And at the same time, when you're working with someone who has never had any exposure to what you're talking to them about, going a little bit broad stroke on all of that context and really understanding what they need to know without jumping from one edge to another and recognizing that they aren't following, but you keep going forward anyway. It's important to be tuned in and recognizing who your audience is in order to make sure that the communication is landing with the precision and the direction that you really need it to have. Clear communication is one of the most honest leadership acts that you can have. I had a conversation recently with someone who talked to me about the distinction between honesty and transparency. Honesty is just telling the truth as you know it. Transparency is actually not shielding part of the truth. And it's really important in terms of trust because when you're honest, but you have that lie of omission that happens, it affects the trust within that relationship. Now, I'm not saying that you need to say every honest truth to every single person that you meet. Again, we're going to go back to that precision. And sometimes holding back on some of the information is the right thing to do. It's called negotiation, right? And so you do need to, again, recognize the balance between these two things of do what I tell them everything that I know from the birth of the idea till current day. Probably very few audiences need that level of context and information and transparency. What you can do is synthesize it to the particular audience that is in front of you. One of the other things that I think about with something like this is really also getting very specific about what you want and what you do not want. And that also drives the way that that communication will go. So, for example, when you say no to someone, it actually eliminates options. It tells them to stop. So there's this theory no is a complete sentence. Yes, I agree with that. But it provides no positive direction. If I only tell you no, then I just stop you in your tracks, and you have nowhere to take that except your next guess, which might result in a different no from me this next time. So when you're leading and you see a behavior, you see someone talking about something that you want them to stop, it's an opportunity for you to say, pause, no, don't want to go that way. Instead, what I want you to be thinking about is X, Y, and Z. So you might be stopping their momentum, pausing their momentum, and then redirecting their efforts in the direction you want them to go. I talk about this a lot with my clients. I don't want this, I don't want that, I don't want this. Okay, what do you want? Because if they don't know, they being the audience, don't know what you want, then every guess is just that. They have no idea about what you really want and how to meet those expectations. So naming what you want is critical so that others have an opportunity to deliver on it. So it's that idea of precision and direction in your communication. And this is such an individual thing. He was talking about in the beginning of his leadership experience that it was this cookie-cutter mindset. Everyone gets the same speech, the same approach, and they're just supposed to figure it out and do the work. Thankfully, we've moved forward from that a little bit. And he had learned throughout his career to be able to evolve into his own authentic way of presenting information and individually connecting with the people who are on his team. Not everyone needs the same message. It's why you sometimes find yourself repeating yourself. Because if you say it to the group, there are some people who will catch what you're putting down. There are some people who won't. They're not connecting with the way that you delivered that message and communicated what you want in that scenario. And that means that when you come back and you say it a different way, now you've connected with a different part of your audience. So, yes, sometimes you have to communicate over and over and over again. One of the things that I used to talk about when I was an HR was in a change management initiative, you've been part of this decision-making process from the first time that ideas were being tossed about about which way are we going to go? How do we want to change this? The people who receive the final message of this is the change we're going to make are starting where you're feeling like you've just completed. And so you have to communicate your why I made this decision over and over and over again until you're sick of talking about it. And then you have to say it five times more. And each time may need a little bit of a nuanced difference in order for the entire population to connect with the messaging. And quite honestly, sometimes people just aren't going to want to hear what you have to say, and you don't have control over that. It doesn't stop the responsibility to own, keep trying, to share that message and trying to get people to connect with where you're going. One of the other things that Jose had mentioned was that you can't motivate anyone. I tend to agree with him on this. People are motivated within themselves, not externally. Like you can push them in a particular direction. You can carry the stick that says, if you don't, then this. They might take then this. So you have to be ready for that. You can't just motivate them through the stick. What you can do is identify what are the things that do motivate them. What is the thing that actually triggers them to try something new or to lean in and try harder in doing something? That's when you have this opportunity to have the discussion about what it actually takes in order for them to move from A to the B place where they want to be. And there's where you have this space where you can say, if this is what you want, your actions that you have going on right now, yeah, they're not leading you there. Let's talk a little bit about how you can make small changes or big changes in order to redesign your approach in order to get to the place that you want to go. And again, this comes back to this authenticity of leadership. When Jose was talking about this, he was talking about look, this is how I talk to people, right? Like I want you to get from where you are to where you want to be, and I'm going to help you design to the extent that I can your path to be able to move in that direction. My argument is that that's always true in leadership. If we want to motivate people to do the things that we want them to do, we have to think about what's in it for them. What's the point of them doing that? And if they don't have a reason to do it, they might not do it. So strong leaders don't treat everyone the same. They see those distinctions. And it requires you as the leader to adapt and change on a regular basis. And by the way, that doesn't mean that you're lowering your standards. The standards stay the same. I expect you to perform at this level. And if I'm going to say you're outstanding, I expect it to be here. And if people rise to that equation, that's really up to their intrinsic motivation of whether or not they're driven to do that or not. That consistency in your expectations paired with a little bit of flexibility in your approach, letting people actually be part of the solution is really critical to your success as a leader. And it keeps people from saying, well, you know, Becky's their favorite. So that's why it's going that way. No. It's really that flexibility and that individualization that on a broad brush is probably far more similar than what you're necessarily giving it credit. Accountability and the metrics for that are meant to create clarity and forward movement. When expectations are honest and support is real, most people rise to the occasion. Leaders aren't responsible for careers, but they are responsible for the truth for their employees to help them understand what's going to get them there and what isn't. So here's your skill builder challenge if you choose to accept it. For a week, notice where you're performing leadership instead of practicing it. Where is it that you feel like you're performing based on what someone told you to do instead of how you really feel that you can connect with the people you're leading? Identify one place you're saying what sounds right instead of what's true for you. The challenge is to replace it with a clear, grounded, and maybe to some degree individualized action for that individual. I always love to hear how some of these things go. So please send me an email, put a message into the chat. I would love to find out what it is that you tried and how that turned out for you. Balanced leadership isn't about trying harder or saying the right things. It's about being steady in your confidence, clear in your communication, and willing to see people as individuals instead of averages across the arc of the team. When you stop performing leadership and start practicing it, the work gets lighter and the impact gets stronger, and you might actually start to enjoy it a little bit more. Because that's where leadership becomes sustainable and not just survivable. Thanks for listening. If you found this episode helpful, share it with someone who could benefit from it. Until next time, I'm Becky Fraser, reminding you to integrate who you are with how you lead. Okay, bye.