Escaping The Purgatory of Middle Management with Amy Balog [Podcast]

Most of the time, leaders feel like victims of the system in which they work, even though they can be deeply connected to their work and care about the mission, the stress takes its toll. These leaders are looking for a better way to stay energized, find hope, and take care of their health in the process.

My guest on this episode of OnCompassion Podcast, Amy Balog, understands the struggle; she is an experienced executive coach who specializes in working with leaders who are struggling to survive, let alone thrive in crushing workplace environments.

How does Amy help leaders? Her method is called Peace Over Performance which is a philosophy that truly embodies the principles of compassion and accountability.

In today’s conversation Dr. Nate and Amy are focusing on a very specific group: Middle Managers who are trapped in a “No win, no way out purgatory,” these leaders are struggling in the transactional nature of corporate leadership roles to effectively advocate for themselves and gain better and more support for the area of accountability.

In this episode

• Amy describes the no-win-no-way-out purgatory that middle managers are experiencing, and why?
• Learn the four internal balance behaviors to stay resilience during stress.
• Which comes first in relationships; trust or conflict?
• What should managers be held accountable for?
• What does it mean to own your leadership craft?

Escaping The Purgatory of Middle Management Highlights

• Conflict is a necessary skill for swimming against the current and changing your situation. Two of the four balance behaviors Amy talked about require compassionate conflict. This aligns with our experience that healthy conflict is a necessary ingredient for strong, trusting teams.
• Any leader has the ability to define the environment they were hired for. Owning your leadership craft, as Amy calls it, means recognizing maximizing the areas in which you have control (how you lead a meeting, daily interactions, critical conversations, communication with stakeholders).
• Asking for help is not an indictment of your competence as a leader. It’s an unsustainable myth that leaders have to solve all the problems and do all the work. In fact, being “help-able” is the opposite of being “helpless,” and it empowers your team as part of the solution.

VOICEOVER: Are you tired of the negativity and drama? Are you trying to make a difference, only to be drained by people problems? The world needs more compassion, not just more civility and empathy. We need in the trenches compassion that struggles alongside people instead of against them. We need a radically different way to engage for breakthrough results. And now here’s your host, Dr. Nate Regier.

NATE REGIER: Welcome to On Compassion with Dr. Nate. Recently our team has been doing leadership training and culture change work with several healthcare systems. And in our time with these leaders, a pervasive theme has been the stress of working so hard, trying to keep up, being understaffed and having more responsibility piled on, and not feeling like there’s a way out. These leaders often feel like victims of the system in which they work. They’re deeply connected to their work and they care about the mission, but the stress is taking its toll.

They’re looking for better ways to stay energized, find hope, and take care of themselves in the process. While they aren’t alone, this is a really hard time to be in mental management. So much change. COVID, the pandemic, division, demands, mental health issues, stress and fatigue. Leaders everywhere are struggling. They’re caught in a vortex that seems impossible to get out of.

My guest today understands this struggle. Amy Balog is an experienced executive coach who specializes in working with leaders who are struggling to survive, let alone thrive in crushing workplace environments. How does she do it? With a method called Peace over Performance. I’ve had Amy on before to talk about this philosophy, which truly embodies the principles of compassionate accountability. Definitely check out that episode. Every time we talk about the different things we’re seeing and how we’re approaching our work, we have so much in common.

And today though, we’re going to zero in on a very specific group. Middle managers that are languishing in what Amy describes as a no win, no way out purgatory. Boy, that’s quite a line. No win, no way out purgatory. These leaders are struggling in the transactional nature of corporate leadership roles to effectively advocate for themselves to gain better and more support for their area of accountability. Amy, welcome to On Compassion.

AMY BALOG: Thank you Nate. It’s so good to be back with you.

NATE REGIER: Well, I’m really looking forward to this conversation and we’ve been talking since the first time you were on, and I know that this episode was coming. We just kind of had to zero in on the thing that just seemed to be the most important thing we wanted to talk about now. And so before we dive into this no win, no way out purgatory, and what managers can do, will you catch us up a little bit on what you’ve been up to? What are you working on these days?

AMY BALOG: Well, peace over performance still stands as a massive theme to my work. But I will say since we have come out or still working our way around, coming out of COVID and whatever waves we are in, or all the turbulence is, I noticed two things. One is people are exhausted and they haven’t figured out how to get back to any kind of cadence at the workplace, it’s still a scramble. And senior leaders are exhausted themselves, and they’re having more trouble than they’ve ever had, getting folks together and engaged. And the folks who always were at a high compression point, middle management, being someone carries a manager, title, director, senior director, vice president perhaps.

What I’m up to has really been managing the realities in that whole group with some of the senior executives I work with. And then in some of the engagements I have in the very middle, in the very heart of organizations. And the reason why I wanted to talk today, the reason why we’re talking is because there is a reoccurring pattern that is about internal balance, that I’ll explain in a minute. It really tightly cords up with the work that you are giving to the world with compassionate accountability, and making conflict a creative energy. And it’s also very behavioral in very, very specific ways.

And what I want to talk about is a way for people in these situations, in middle management that feel like they are Stuck with a capital S. How to pay attention to the right behaviors within them to be able to navigate out of situations, where it seems like nobody’s advocating for them. And there’s just nothing more than just more and more and more and more work coming their way, and with teams that are all burned out around them. And that’s what I want to dig into. And we’re going to do it with a story. And it’s because I’ve been living it in an intense way in the last few months.

NATE REGIER: Wow. Well, let’s outline the problem. I know that you’re doing some really innovative work and I think we’re going to learn here today about some maybe counterintuitive ways to look at this that we might not be thinking, and maybe looking at some different places for the answers. Will you describe for us what is this difficult spot? What is this no win, no way out purgatory. So what people facing?

AMY BALOG: Let’s do it in a story format because I think that will bring it to life for people. So imagine this, you have somebody in a company or any kind of company, any industry, but let’s just for illustrative purposes, let’s take a high tech company that’s growing, even through the pandemic and also acquiring companies. And you have someone that’s running in any kind of area, pick a domain, sales operations. And what’s really happened is the company’s outgrown the domain area. It’s actually outgrown it. So what happens is you have probably head count issues and then now you’re having trouble hiring people.

You’re having situations where the team is burned out situation where maybe the technology and the processes they’re using aren’t going to keep up with the initiatives that are coming over the cliff, the land on them. And they don’t necessarily feel like they have an incredibly strong voice among the noise in the organization to sort of reseat their whole domain area. And so they’re just really just trying to get their noses barely above the waterline each and every day and survive.

NATE REGIER: Well any one of those things you mentioned would be difficult on any given day, but there’s a whole series of things all at the same time that they’re kind of, I guess the buck stops with them in some way, but yet they don’t necessarily have ultimate control over that.

AMY BALOG: But how we come to it is the key. And one of the things that you and I talk about is that conflict is of the predecessor to even building relationships and influence. And what that means is that our ability to be able to deal with conflict and transform it towards a compassion experience, which is what you do in the body of the work that you guys bring at next element is key. But I am even saying to connect to your work, that behaviors that lie within us, specific behaviors help us get to that place where we’re able to see and use conflict as an advantage point.

So we need to walk through some of these behaviors in a real situation so that people can kind of say, oh, I see myself, I kind of see myself there and pick them out because we’ve talked about a lot in this world about people can’t find balance. But this, I’m talking about a different kind of balance. I’m talking about the balance that we need to take with behaviors within, in situations where we perceive to have, and we might have very little control, but we actually have a lot of options at our disposal if we were able to take steps forward that were specifically balancing certain behaviors.

NATE REGIER: Wow. I’m curious now because you have said that, okay, I think a lot of our listeners can relate to this problem. It’s like they maybe are in it, maybe they know people are in it. And you’ve said that “Hey, being a squeaky wheel isn’t going to do it. Who’s coming to save these people?” And I think you’ve even said that you’re pretty frank with your clients that “Hey, your employer’s not coming to save you today, and you can’t just sit here and complain and wait for somebody to do something.” So, where do you want to take us here? I’m trying to unpack this.

AMY BALOG: Yeah, so let’s do an example. Let’s say that there… Can I introduce characters?

NATE REGIER: Sure.

AMY BALOG: All right.

NATE REGIER: I love stories.

AMY BALOG: Okay, so let’s say Maggie is running this organization I described and what she’s been doing is she’s not aware of how to use conflict powerfully and she’s not aware of that there’s all these options with behaviors when we embark down compassion, accountability. And so she’s trying to swim with the currents and everything’s coming out. So she created this team, her whole team loves her because she works right alongside them. She’s a subject matter expert.

So she’s in the trenches full out, but things are getting bigger and more complex. So Maggie gets to a place where she’s just exhausted and she’s thinking, I can’t do this anymore, and she resigns. And we lose Maggie and the team in Maggie, there were days that they were, it was us against them with the organization trying to defend their borders about everything. And there was days they were heroes because they managed somehow to pull off the impossible.

So now Tracy’s hired, and so I don’t want to do this podcast with you indicting the Maggie’s of the world because the truth is we all could fall into Maggie’s stuff. We could all fall into these kind of patterns at any given moment. So I’m just going to put that up front, but we have to have a contrast here to look at what I’m talking about. So Tracy is hired, and they hire Tracy at a higher level. They hire her as a senior director, instead of Maggie was out a director and really they hire Tracy thinking, you know what? Tracy’s boss Jack is busy, he’s under a thousand challenges and pressures and so Tracy will just have to go figure this whole thing out.

Now Tracy has a choice coming into this, new to the company, she can go into the purgatory that Maggie was in this no win purgatory and try to swim along with the current and keep up and kind of peck away at some of the problems because there’s lot of problems. There’s not the right head count, maybe not the right kind of skill level in the team, not the right advocacy for the area. Basically the domain has to be sort reset, repurposed. All that has to happen in the fury of everybody putting fires out all around them.

So Tracy can either go into the purgatory or she can self power and go into places where she will be able to use conflict powerfully. So there’s a couple things, and as I talk through some of these behaviors, you and I can just go back and forth. And I’ll just say, well contrast where Maggie was inside herself versus where Tracy needs to be to self empower, because what Tracy needs to do is actually swim against the current because we have to break patterns, we have to swim against the current and there’s a lot of things. So now I’m going to stop there for a second. Any thoughts or comments before I go on?

NATE REGIER: So you’ve brought up conflict here as… You’re talking about it as if it might be part of the solution, and I think a lot of our listeners might say, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, conflict was the problem. That was the thing that the first character was running, getting away from, it was too much. And so I think it’s important to clarify that we’re not talking about… We’re talking drama as the stuff that we don’t want to be part of, that’s draining. But you’re talking about conflict I think in the way that we do, which is that it really does have positive potential. And so I’m guessing you’re going to share with us, what does it look like when we use conflict as a catalyst for positive change?

AMY BALOG: So Maggie and Tracy have something in common. They both want to own their job and really succeed, and they both want to care about the team. So that’s for sure. So the intentions are really strong, they don’t want to let anybody down. But well here’s what has to happen. There’s behaviors within us that give us our resilience to be able to swim against currents. In every single job you have, anywhere in corporate America right now. And maybe the current feels stronger than it’s ever felt in terms of propulsion of things happening that you don’t control. You got to swim against the current, most of the time.

So here’s what that means. The first thing I want to get into is the first behavior that readies us to think about conflict differently. The first behavior we have to have inside of ourselves is deep self-acceptance, a deep self-acceptance, so deep, so radically deep that we’re fine that we’re not going to be able to please everybody all the time. And the most important thing about that, and I talked about that in the last podcast we had together peace over performance, is our job is not our identity. So if I contrast Maggie and Tracy, what if Maggie’s challenges was her job was her identity?

And so her self-acceptance was like a strobe light based on how she was performing in her job and any day because it was unsustainable what was happening. Some days she was clobbered and she just felt completely defeated, and it completely put her into high stress and very extraordinary, even fear of being able to confront that. And so she would just heads down, try to work her way out of it, but then as you would say in your material, go potentially into drama. So self-acceptance is the first behavior.

Self-acceptance for Tracy is about listen, this job is an asset to the company and so is this team. And so I am okay where I’m at, but I’ve got to help this company figure out how to use this asset well, and it’s going to be a journey. And there’s going to be some good days with it and there’s going to be some really bad days with it, but it’s not going to affect my worth. It’s not going to be affect what I believe and trust in myself.

And when we trust in ourselves, and you said it in your book really, really powerfully, “When you trust in yourself, you’re really okay with being able to be more compassionate.” You are okay with that. And I’m going to let that sit with you for a second because that’s something you talk about. So that’s self-acceptance. Do you want to add anything else to that first part?

NATE REGIER: No, I really appreciate that and there’s something strangely empowering when a leader is vulnerable enough to say how I’m doing is different than who I am. And on any given day, we may be having days down days, we may be getting clobbered, we may be having success, but our value as human beings never changes. I think that is something that is such a fresh and empowering message for the people that work around that leader as well.

AMY BALOG: So that’s one behavior of internal balance that needs to be grabbed a hold of first, at the deepest core level, because if that’s knocked off then everything else follows that. The second one, and this is interesting and I have truly found this as systemic in people struggling in my practice, is to learn how to work from a place of mutual help. And this is something I get from some of my Harrison training, but really what this is about is, I will help other people while I ask other people to help me.

So there’s an interesting thing. There is some hesitancy. So in the Maggie Tracy world, Maggie really put herself last, and Maggie felt sometimes helpless. So therefore she didn’t feel comfortable asking for help in this sense of does it indict my competency? Or everybody else is working so hard, how could I ask them for anything?

But what we need to understand about asking for help, asking for help is actually the healthiest thing, not only to do for yourself, but it’s the healthiest thing to do for the entire environment because the place of mutual help is I am helping because I am actually also helpable, and I’m helping by being helpable. And so what Tracy needs to do is be honest and what you say in part of your work with going open, being really honest with here’s how I feel about what we’ve got on plate.

I’ve divided the problems across what’s going on with this area, sale tops, there’s six different things going on. I’m going to try to solve three right now as I lead us towards a new future, and here’s where I’m going to need help. And being able to go out and say that makes you in instantaneously, when you speak of it that way, yes you are still swimming against the current because I’m telling you that people you go to ask for help are maybe going to initially resist because they’re already burned out, and it’s going to take time.

But even taking that step in saying here’s what I see, here’s what I want to do to, this is what needs to be done, and here’s the real help I need. And you would be surprised Nate, I do a ton of work in companies and get behavioral data back and so many people don’t feel comfortable asking for help. And that little tiny behavior is huge. It’s huge.

NATE REGIER: Oh my goodness. Yes. And you’ve just undercut one of the main myths of compassion, which is a lot of people think of compassion as alleviating suffering. So if I’m going to be compassionate, I go fix everything. I go take the burden, I go take your struggle away. And even the classic line, I’m here to remove barriers for you. Well so, this idea of I’m the one as the leader that’s going to do all the struggling and suffering so your life can be easy, is a complete myth. Compassion is exactly what you’re saying, which is mutual help, struggle with, we’re in this together and our fate are codependent. It’s not me saving you every day.

AMY BALOG: And I’m going to add this to that because when I took your training and I loved it, was I initially thought about struggling with is let me make sure I am struggling with someone when I think about compassion. But you know what? It is also that I make myself available for someone to struggle with me. You know what I mean? But to be helpable versus to be in drama and feel helplessness is different. How we ask for help matters. At first that we even ask for help, and second, how we do it. And that to give ourselves permission to do, it’s really powerful. So, that one little behavior is huge.

And now, gosh, the other one is, Maggie in her world to swim with the current and not deal with conflict, she was really being careful and not say a lot of things that needed to be said. She would just not say a lot of things that needed to be said, until she would blow up, and then say it in ways that would cause volatility and then cause more of an inconsistency in her leadership that people didn’t know which Maggie they were getting some days.

And it was that kind of reactive thing. And now Tracy to come in self-powered is to balance something called forthright diplomacy, which is where I have to tell you the real thing, I have to tell you. We have to talk about the most important thing, but I have to have an understanding of your world. So I’m going to lay the very specific context of the real thing we need to talk about with respect with what’s in your world. So hey sales, I know you’re mad at sales operations right now and here’s what I understand that’s going on in sales, and I’m sensitive to that, and I want you to know I hear you and I’m with you.

But here’s the thing we really still have to talk about because we won’t get better together until we talk about this. So you work in this space and swimming against the tide it’s being okay with holding your energy in forthright diplomacy for a while. Let the initial conversations be uncomfortable. I love in your book, you talk about how you have to sometimes go through cycles and cycles and cycles with conversations, to allow us to get used to having the honest conversation, but that it respects our worlds, it respects your world, it respects my world completely.

But that’s another balance, and that’s so important in being able to work out of this, not get stuck in the purgatory. Because if you have a situation that we described by the business on the very upfront of this whole talk, you have to know there’s 70 missing conversations. There’s a lot of missing conversations and we assume that nobody’s willing to have them or have time until we’ve really, really worked at the conversation. We really worked at having the dialogue. And it does take work that’s swimming against the currents.

NATE REGIER: My friend Arlene Chisholm has a great book on conflict and she says “Most problems occur because of the conversation we should have had, but we didn’t.” And it sounds like that’s what Tracy was willing to do.

AMY BALOG: And it’s being able to balance two things. I can be direct about what has to be said while respecting our worlds and really taking all of that into account at the same time. It means that I can’t just wing it all the time. I have to think about how I have the conversations and it means that the first time we do this it might not go well, but if we hold that balance intact every time we come at it, we’ll get better at it. When my clients do this, they improve their situations, but they have to be patient. They have to be patient.

NATE REGIER: Great stuff. So we have three behaviors so far. One of them is disconnecting your value from your work that you’re okay.

AMY BALOG: Self-acceptance.

NATE REGIER: Self-acceptance. You talk about mutual help, being able to ask for help. And then your third one is about-

AMY BALOG: Forthright diplomacy.

NATE REGIER: Forthright diplomacy. Having those real conversations, and holding that tension there. Any other behaviors?

AMY BALOG: Well there is a truth exploring behavior, and truth exploring is about… When Maggie, let’s go back to Maggie swimming with the current, trying to play it safe. She has some strong points of view about what Tracy was basically hired to do. She had some strong points of view about how things should change but wasn’t comfortable bringing them up a lot of times because, well, I mean it’s going to create more challenges for other people if I bring this up, it indicts other areas of the company. It creates problems. And so I’m going to try to suggest things or not confront.

So whereas forthright diplomacy is what we do to really face the message and open respect, truth exploring is where we really, regardless of whether people are absolutely ready yet or not for, we pick out the things that are the most profound truths that we should be talking about for the good of us, the good of this. And if you’re going to do that, for instance, one of the truths is if we load up these initiatives, the chief sales officer just signed with another vendor, our function is going to collapse.

So what is a point of view? So in truth exploring you balance two things. You balance having a real point of view. And that point of view doesn’t mean that you can’t be persuaded to have a different point of view, but you have courage to have the voice of that point of view. And at the same time, you also boldly invite people to challenge and talk about it and think about it. You create the forums for the conversation. So truth exploring is we have to explore truth together.

And similar to all things, if you’re in a company where everybody’s burned out and running at 5,000 miles per hour, people will tell you, well, we just don’t have time to put that on the media agenda. You really do have to swim against the current and say, what are the key areas where we need to have real truth exploring? And for me to hold my ground and balance, I’ve got to be very strong about some ideas and some opinions. But then I also have to be very open, and I have to think about everybody in the room, and making sure they have a voice to have everything talked about in the room.

When my clients jump into that space, regardless of whether they immediately get anything done or not, that is immediately exuding leadership presence, and people start to really pay attention to you. And again, when you think about conflict, will conflict come up in those meetings? Absolutely. But you want it. You want it because then it’s revealing the context that you need on the table to get things done.

NATE REGIER: Well this is such great wisdom. You’ve shared with us four really important behaviors. And I know I’m guessing it takes time to work on these and to make these shifts. And that first one is a tough one that can be a lifelong journey for someone. We have a few minutes left. I’d love to hear what kind of results are you seeing, that does this work? Can Tracy succeed in today’s environment or does she get chewed up and spit out just like everyone else?

AMY BALOG: Well yes, Tracy can succeed in today’s environment. And the key is, the uncomfortable thing is sometimes you have to let some fires burn, let some things go unresolved to do this work, because this work… If you think about all the things we talked about, none of it is quick. All of it takes time. But if you think about the leadership work you’re doing with companies, the leadership work that happens with companies, it’s when people actually put leadership energy into the system, regardless of whether something’s immediately getting done or not, what’s happening is they’re already starting to change the way people can come together.

Right now that’s really, really needed. Because right now people have been living in these very transactional environments, the overworked and tired environments. And just being able to pull people together and have the real conversations and do it in really compassionate and powerful ways, and just allow conflict to sit in a healthy space, that by itself has extraordinary value. Extraordinary value. So my short answer is absolutely, and I’ve definitely seen, and experience a lot of my clients coming out of the other side of this, in better shape than they went in for sure.

NATE REGIER: So with these strategies, they’re able to continue to be in the system, but not get eaten up by it, and a bit by bit start to change themselves from the inside out. And then that starts to change the system it sounds like, because they’re still not waiting for anyone to come to their rescue.

AMY BALOG: You hear these stories about work on your brand, it feels very self-promoting, or you hear these stories of I got to go get an advocate. Well yeah, there’s nothing wrong with getting an advocate, but you also have to be a very powerful advocate for yourself around what’s happening in the realities that you’re leading to create the advocate. So you’ve got to create the helpable environment for advocates.

NATE REGIER: Well, I want to end with something that you mentioned, we haven’t talked about yet. And I recently had a great conversation with Seth Godin and one of the things… I love his distinction between management and leadership, and he really talked about how managers often have authority and control, but leaders sometimes don’t. And the difference between a leader is what they have… The only thing they can do is gain enrollment. And enrollment is when you choose, and I want to be in this course, I want to be in this company, I want to do this.

So you’ve talked about owning your leadership craft, and I think you’re really talking about… These four things you’re talking about here. This is what it means to be a real leader versus just a manager that is going with the flow and trying to keep their head above water. So will you land this plane with us by telling us what it means? And what is your vision for middle managers to really own their leadership craft?

AMY BALOG: I think to know that they have the ability to define the environment that they were hired for. They have the ability to define the environment they were hired for. So what does that mean exactly? It simply means that, you are not there to just clock in, clock out. You are there actually truly, and you’re not also there just to try to manage up or try to create just a win through one initiative. You’re really there to own the environment.

So that means that you can absolutely build out an incredible team environment, one step, one conversation at a time. You can build this out. You own the environment. And I know that’s confusing to some people because they see a lot of things out of their control, but you own the environment for all the meetings that you can create. You own the environment for the kind of things that your teams experience. You own the environment for kind of interactions you want to have with your peers. You own the environment for how you want to deal with helping senior stakeholders understand your area.

You own that entire environment. You own it, right? So there is a lot of drama in organizations that would tell you, you don’t own any of that. And so it’s not like you can own all the circumstances that are happening to you. You can’t own the problems, you can’t own the people that they sometimes put on your team. There’s a lot of things that you could say, “I didn’t own that. I didn’t hire that person, I didn’t make that decision that the senior executive made. I didn’t hire that consulting company.” There’s a lot of things you can say I didn’t own, but you own a lot of other things.

And if you see those things that you own, all these interactions, you own this balance inside of you. I come into a meeting, I’m putting this meeting together. I own the way I want to have this conversation. So if you look at all of that, that’s really, really powerful way to just really see what you can do.

NATE REGIER: Yeah. Wow. Amy, thank you. Wow. We could go on all day and there’s probably another conversation in our future, but I just really appreciate you sharing your wisdom and just the vast experience you have working with people in this pressure cooker, and helping them find hope when there is a lot going against us these days. And I think this is a message we so need to hear because in the era of the great resignation, it’s so easy for top leaders to companies to feel like a victim. What can we do? We can’t please everybody all the time.

We can’t afford to pay them what they want. They’re leaving in droves. And I think you’re saying there’s two sides to this equation. Everybody is personally responsible for defining the environment in which they want to lead and defining how they want to show up every day. So Amy, thank you so much for being here today and for sharing your wisdom with my audience.

AMY BALOG: It was so good to be here with you, Nate. I love our time together.

NATE REGIER: For those people, I would like to contact you or learn more about your work, where should they go?

AMY BALOG: The easiest place actually is just to find Amy Balog on LinkedIn because I prolifically write up there and put all my media work I do up there, and all kinds of good stuff is out there. So just find me on LinkedIn, and it’s B-A-L-O-G.

NATE REGIER: I can attest to that. I follow you and you always have wonderful things. Have a great day everyone, and thank you for joining this episode of On Compassion.

Amy always brings such wisdom and practical tips for leaders. Here are my top takeaways from our conversation. First conflict is a necessary skill for swimming against the current and changing your situation. Two of the four balanced behaviors Amy talked about require compassionate conflict. This aligns with our experience, that healthy conflict is a necessary ingredient for strong trusting teams.

Second, any leader has the ability to define the environment they were hired for. Owning your leadership craft, as Amy calls it, means recognizing and maximizing areas in which you have control, like how you lead a meeting, daily interactions, critical conversations, or communication with stakeholders. And third, asking for help is not an indictment of your competence as a leader. It’s an unsustainable myth that leaders have to solve all the problems and do all the work. In fact, being helpable is the opposite of being helpless and it empowers your team as part of the solution.

VOICEOVER: I hope you enjoyed this episode of On Compassion with Dr. Nate. If you found new hope or guidance for your life, will you share it with your tribe? If you know someone who could be a great guest, please let us know. Are you ready for a practical way to bring more compassion to your organization? We have a solution. Visit www.thecompassionmindset.com. Check out the show notes for links and contact information and remember to subscribe, rate and give a review on iTunes. Thanks for listening. Until next time, keep your compassion mindset engaged.