In my last episode, I had a great conversation with Robert Heath, and we hit on something I see with smart, capable leaders. It's that moment where you're doing everything you're supposed to do. You're the hardworking, caring leader who takes responsibility. And somehow, things are getting heavier instead of easier. What makes that realization tricky is that nothing is obviously wrong. From the outside, it can look like commitment. It's underneath that tension and uncertainty reside. 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'm offering strategies for building your skills as a leader. Let's break down what's important as you evolve as a leader. It struck me when talking with Robert that nothing explodes in the moments we discussed. There isn't a dramatic failure or a single moment where everything goes sideways. Instead, there's a slow accumulation of signals, the kind that shows up when a leader has outgrown the way they've been operating. He reached a point where having the role, the background, and the work ethic didn't automatically mean things would move forward. These are the moments when you recognize you are relying on what used to work, and you must be willing to admit that you're in a new territory. He and I also spent a lot of time around effort. Robert was putting in long hours, taking on more himself, doing everything a good leader is supposed to do. Sound familiar? This might too. He was also watching the things stall anyway. It's this familiar space. Effort feels like the right answer, but sometimes it's the very thing getting in the way of progress. Robert kept coming back to whether what he was doing was actually helping. Not whether his intentions were good, because of course they were. Or whether he was working hard, because of course he was. But it was whether people and outcomes were changing. And maybe he wasn't certain that they were. He needed to take the pressure off and also raise the bar in a useful way. One of the key insights with Robert was when he realized his role model wasn't the gold standard that he had believed her to be. Most leaders are rewarded for sounding confident and not for admitting they've discovered how wrong the current path is. What happens when you realize your compass is broken, and maybe the target was the wrong target in the first place? With Robert, he called it his leadership sojourn. He described it as going out into the wilderness and trying to figure this thing out before he tried to come back and do anything. And he recognized that his singular focus on a particular goal had actually been a little bit of a blind spot for him. Sometimes you need to change direction and step into learning. This is often when the change you need appears or gets created. That awareness actually pushes you to seek out change, even when that change is only within yourself. For me, there was a moment in my career where I took on a role because I genuinely believed it would be a true partnership with the business. It was positioned that way, after all. I was told I'd have a seat at the table, I'd have real influence and the ability to shape decisions instead of just reacting to them. Yep, you guessed it. What I didn't see at first was how different the actual reality was. The expectations were actually pretty administrative. The work was reactive, and my role was to execute decisions that had been made by others. I had believed the choice was a good one only to discover how wrong I was. Honestly, it took me longer than it should have to name that gap, partly because I wanted to believe the original story, and partly because I was so busy trying to make it work anyway. But once I saw it clearly, it changed how I evaluated leadership and partnership. Titles and promises stopped carrying as much weight. Okay, you might think this was just the one time, and I'm here to say it wasn't. I had a tendency to buy into the possibility or idea of a role instead of its stark reality. I learned through all of these experiences that had me feeling like I just wasn't seeing what was in front of me to ask more questions. Some of those roles were more aligned than others, and sometimes I was just a square peg in a round hole. These roles did cause me to have experience in another thing that Robert spoke about. It's that working too hard to make everything keep moving forward thing. Overfunctioning is one of the most socially acceptable leadership traps. Working longer for whatever reason seems like it feels more responsible. And we feel noble when we're carrying it across the finish line. Maybe we're dragging ourselves across the finish line. The thing is, effort doesn't automatically translate to impact. Instead, what you do is run yourself ragged and you feel as if your efforts aren't serving anyone at all. Robert described a time when he was putting in 12, 13, 14-hour days. And no matter how much he was doing personally, their results were not improving. In fact, they actually got worse. It prompted him to have a realization that though he was successful externally, he was missing and losing a part of what he'd gone in and done this work for in the first place. Like Robert, there was a point earlier in my career where I genuinely thought that I was doing it right because I was the person so many came to. I had answers and I could step in with a solution. For a while, that looked like success, where people trusted me and things didn't fall apart. What I didn't see at the time was that I was quietly training everyone around me to need me. Decisions stalled without my input. Problems escalated instead of being solved where they lived. I thought I was building trust, but I was actually becoming the bottleneck. It was a gut punch when I realized that the direction I was heading wasn't leadership at all. It was actually you, it was my ego being fed by others needing me. Once I saw that, I couldn't unsee it. And if you're in your role, answering every question, fixing every issue, staying late so things don't fall apart, it might be worthwhile to ask yourself, am I doing this because this is how I get praised for my dedication? But I'm not necessarily seeing any of those improvements. And I hope for your sake that it's not like Robert's circumstance, where it was actually getting worse. If you're a regular listener, you know that this is a theme that keeps on coming up. I talk about how we train people how to treat us. Other guests that I've talked to have said, I know how to delegate. And there are circumstances that come into play when all of a sudden we recognize it's actually not a choice. Because if you continue to work that hard and do all of the things, actually you're not helping the organization and you're not helping your team. And let me just say simply, you are not helping you. The thing is that good intentions are not rare in leadership, but impact, impact can be. Robert shifted from defending his motives to interrogating his results. That move changed everything. He started asking himself, is what I'm doing helping? Because that's the result that he actually wanted. He calls that the intention trap, where our intentions blind us to the results of our actions. There was a point in my work where I also kept telling myself I was being helpful. Sadly, I often felt that a step off the wheel would mean I'd lose my credibility. What made me pause was realizing that the same issues kept resurfacing. Different people, same pattern, same song, new verse. It wasn't changing anything. I was just making it easier to keep everyone else operating the same way that they had. In a word, I was enabling them. That's when I started asking a harder question. Not whether I was needed, but whether what I was doing was actually helping things move forward. That shift changed how I show up. I stopped measuring my value by how quickly I could respond and started paying attention to whether the system was stronger without me in the middle. You might believe you're being supportive, and then you see that your team is disengaged. You might believe that you're being clear, but confusion keeps on showing up. The question isn't about your intentions, it's about your impact. Maybe my walk down memory lane stirred something for you. But please know, you're not doing leadership wrong. You're likely doing it the way you learned how to do it. And now you're at this inflection point, if you will, where you're wanting to evolve into a new style of leadership. Leadership evolves whether we notice it or not. The question is whether we're willing to notice when the work has shifted. Sometimes our confidence needs to be replaced with curiosity. Other times, effort needs to give way to structure or to those delegation skills that we know but don't always practice. And sometimes good intentions need to be tested against real outcomes. There's a phrase that is something along the lines of the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So be careful how much faith you put into those intentions. You don't have to shift all of this at once. You just have to be honest about the role you're actually playing and the impact it's creating or not. That honesty is what makes leadership sustainable. 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.