Freedom isn't free: How Real Leaders Let Go and Scale Up

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Transcript

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Let me ask you something. If you stepped away from your community unexpectedly for 30 days or just decided this was it, is there somebody that is ready to take your place? Is there somebody that you've been training? Is there somebody that you could say, you've got this, I believe in you. If there's not my advice to you today, and what we wanna talk about is let's start building more freedom for you. If there's not someone that you could just give the reins to for you to take a vacation a weekend or 30 days for a medical emergency, then we gotta start building that for you because. You deserve time off, right? And that's what the episode is all about today. It's all about creating influence, mentorship, going from control to coaching, being a strategic coach and understanding that it is in your best interest to have somebody that can step in for you in a drop of a hat because. Folks, freedom ain't free. And if you want uninterrupted time off, you need to be investing in your leadership team or somebody inside of your community that can problem solve, understand the regs, and make decisions quickly and keep your community running consistently. Welcome to this episode of The Aspire for More with Aaron podcast, where today we're going to break down the lie of control based leadership and step into what I truly believe transforms senior living and that's influence. We have got to let go of control and we gotta start embracing influence. And hopefully you're already there. And if you're not, this is just the beginning because this is influence honestly, is the future of leadership for senior living, for actually everybody inside, businesses where you now have multiple generations where you're gonna have some baby boomers. You're gonna have some millennials, you're gonna have some generation Gen Xers, gen Zers, and then all the other generations coming up. We are getting past the point of being able to tell people what to do and those people doing it. It's just. We're not there, and I think we're not there anymore. And I think that what is happening with burnout and frustration and, and having to feel like we have to do everything, which is a control mindset, is we are asking people to do things and expecting them to do it, but not giving them a why or maybe even a true understanding of. What to do. We think they know, and maybe they know, but maybe they don't know. And so this extra burden of proof is on us. This extra burden of teaching, exposing mentoring is on the leader to ensure that this person knows what to do, and not in a negative way, but in a positive. I see you. I want you to live to your full potential kind of way. It's important to understand and to give yourself grace in this way, because I have struggled with this very thing that we're talking about. Control, doing it myself. But when I made an intentional effort to train people in advance and tie the why into it, and the impact of why this works for them in a positive way, something as simple as bringing residents to the activities programming, if you're in memory care, why that benefits the caregiver to do that is. We think it's too hard some ways the time element of the term investment and time does matter, but the long-term gain. For this short term effort is really, really important to understand. And the other aspect is this. I think this is really a key that I have come to understand now more today than I fully understood while I was inside the community. And I use this every day. to my benefit as the leader of the community to understand that the only expectation that I need to have is an expectation for myself. I need to live my life at a higher standard that I can control my reactions, my understanding. I'm not setting myself up for disappointment. My expectations are high because this is the standard that I want to live to, and my expectations of others are at a basic standard of civility and humanity and policy and procedure and regulatory. When we expect a version of ourselves from other people, we set other people up to fail. It is unfair to put an expectation of my own standard, my education, the investment in my growth, the investment in my mental health, the investment in my emotional health, the investment in the way that I want to feel on other people. They let me down in some way, shape, or form. Right, but when I understand that my expectation is to live a certain way and no one else influences that, except for people who live a higher standard than me, and I wanna live up to that standard and that other people's choices no longer define my worth, no longer define my experience. It only shows me where my focus needs to go. That is an inherent mindset shift from control to influence. I cannot control somebody's reactions. I cannot control somebody's decisions that they make based on the lens of life that they look through. There have been times when I was working inside of a community where I invested so much of my time and energy to make people feel valued, seen, heard. They understood their role, their impact, everything. When they walked into my community, it wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but they knew how important they were to me and the success of this community, and yet many people. Made bad choices and did things that said things that really hurt my feelings, could say devastated me, really. I don't change the way I act. I don't change the standard of the way that I lead. I don't change anything because they made bad decisions. I can't control that, but I can control how I want to lead my community in an authentic way But because I learned and at the beginning stages of learning that I don't get to control and that it doesn't matter how much love and attention and affection that I pour into people, they can only react at the level of emotional maturity that they're at. And it doesn't matter how much I pour into them without them pouring into themselves and having self-awareness and self-regulation and understanding the bigger picture and understanding what their own worth is. They are going to react the way that they know how to react. The expectations that we have for people, the understanding that we can't control people and the decisions they make, it releases us from the pressure that control brings. That's why influence becomes so attractive as a leader. It's because it releases us. From understanding that we are responsible for people's actions. No. We are accountable for people's actions. We're not responsible for them. And that's a big, big, big difference. Big difference. If you do your training and you have documentation and you're communicating well, and you're leading well, and you've got the flow going on inside your community, you are going to have moments. that just knock you down sometimes. Like why would you make this decision? The difference that control and influence brings to you in how we house these emotions is control makes you feel responsible, but influence teaches you that you're not, you're just accountable. You have to do something about the decisions that were made. But you don't house the guilt because you're not responsible for it. And so that's why it's important to really, for me to focus in on the illusion that we've all bought into in healthcare. And I think some of it has to do with the pressures of occupancy, the pressures of survey, the pressures of families, like we all have all these expectations, and the only way that we know how to survive these expectations is to control things. Because it makes you feel in control, right? It makes me feel in control. If I feel like I can set the tone and be apart and double check all the things and check off things and have you report to me, and then I dictate to you what you need to do, that feels like you're in control, but really that's a lie. Because you are giving up so much to be in control. Freedom isn't free. Control isn't success, right? Maybe control brings you short wins, maybe control gives you a great survey, but what did it cost you? More than likely, it cost you a peace of mind, freedom and a lot of time at home. I used to think that being in control meant I was a good leader. I answered everything first. I checked everything twice, before I left I made sure all the i's were dotted and the T's are crossed. let me tell you, those things are good, especially when you're having to rebuild a reputation. Or rebuild a department or having a plan of correction after a really bad survey. Those things are important, and especially when you're trying to train somebody, those things are required, but how long you stay in those moments of micromanaging and control is really, really important because if you stay there, there's no freedom, there's no growth for you. Or for the people that you're trying to train. No growth in a control room. Only orders given. Orders completed, and communication back. It's exhausting trying to control everything. the senior living culture has normalized burnout and martyrdom. You know, having these conversations of how much I have worked, I've worked 12 hours for the last seven days in a row. I mean, how many times have we heard that statement? And I have been one to say one of those, but activity. Is not accomplishment. Right? Being busy is not being productive, and there are days when we have to work 12 hour days and those days we're productive every single hour, right? But if that's the norm, we've got problems. We gotta look at our systems, we gotta look at what we're trying to control, and we're not empowering other leaders. Okay? Being a hero and being a martyr are two different sides of the same coin. It's, that's a little bit aggressive, and that's a little bit dramatic, right? But when people are praising you for everything that you're doing, and you're working 12 hours a day, seven to 12 days in a row, you feel good about what you're doing. But when people start telling you what you're not doing right, things that you're missing. And you're working seven to 10 days in a row, 12 hour shifts, you're getting upset because they're not seeing the effort that you're putting in. And in those moments, I want you to ask yourself, am I busy? Am I doing activities? But I'm not productive, I don't feel accomplished. That's the spinning your wheels. It's because you're trying to control too much. You're focusing on things that you cannot affect change on. And you're not paying attention to what has to be done by you, only you, what's expected, and things to bring the vision and move the community forward and not just stay in the same position, which could be a negative position. So real talk here. Most of us are surviving leadership. We're not scaling it. Control is survival mode. Influence is scalability. Sustainability. It's literally being able to walk away from your phone when you're at home, or literally being able to go on a vacation and not worry 24 hours a day. Freedom isn't free. It comes from multiplying leadership and power authority tasks, problem solving. Not from hoarding it. You gotta give people the opportunity to sink or swim. Think about why you're so good at what you do. Is it because somebody allowed you to make mistakes and learn from them, or is it because they did everything for you and you figured it out on your own? Most of the time it's because somebody gave us projects to do and told us to figure it out. And we had the willingness and the fortitude to try to do it. We can't expect our leaders to be who we want them or need them to be. if we're not giving them the opportunity to try get it right or get it wrong, and learn from the experience. You gotta let go of control and let them figure it out. Let them get uncomfortable. Let them work it out. We want to be able to help them, mentor them. We don't want to bring solutions to them all the time. We wanna be a strategic coach and not necessarily the first responder solving all the problems. We wanna create the space for growth and the opportunity to do the work to grow. So let's talk about the three levels of leadership influence that are really, really important. Control based leadership is the lowest level of leadership influence. Okay? This is the exhausting. I decide everything. I decide for you what you will do. I have to have the authority. I may delegate tasks for you, but I'm gonna teach you how to do them. I'm gonna tell you how to do them. I'm going to potentially even do it for you because you're not doing it well enough or fast enough, and I'm going to lead through enforcing the rules, micromanaging, maybe some fear-based leadership tactics in there. And the result of that type of leadership, I'm sure you know, it can be high stress, low trust, and disengaged teams. The secret to know is that trust, that five letter word is where influence is born, where that safe space is when I feel like I can trust somebody I'm gonna work really hard for them, right? At a control based leadership, I can't even trust myself if my leader is micromanaging me. at this level, leaders are trying to micromanage everything, their teams, their outcomes, even the circumstances that they cannot control. The only thing going back to the front part of this episode is the only thing that you can control. Are your own choices, your own responses, the way that you look at every situation. You cannot control people outcomes or circumstances. Now, I do believe you can influence them, and I do believe you can be very proactive. You can find patterns. You can identify the patterns you can use the patterns, and you can create patterns for yourself. That is true. But you cannot control all the elements to keep people in making the right decisions, and you have to figure out why you wanna do that in the first place. I think one of the most fascinating things about a very empowering and growth culture is that there's creativity in problem solving. Okay, there's room for somebody to look at, a wholistic viewpoint of a resident or an incident and figure out what is the best way to solve this problem. If we're not given the space to think about it critically and creatively, then we're not gonna get to the root of the problem. Control based leadership fails because there is no creativity. There is no room to look at a problem and think about it from many different angles. Innovation, problem solving, or even adaptability, becomes hard because of the fear of failing and the reaction from a leader who is going to get upset that it wasn't done the way that it was supposed to be. There's no ownership inside of a control based leadership led community. Employees feel powerless, disengaged, or frustrated? I mean, I've been there. Haven't you been there? No. Retention or if there are, it's the wrong people. if you're leading from a control standpoint, you're going to. Lose people who want the creativity, who wanna own their department, who want to become better leaders. And you're going to keep the people who like the drama and wanna fight you for control, or the ones who are willing to do whatever it is you say and not think anything more about it. And that's why we don't grow. and there's no impact, The leader is focused on what they can't control, and so you're always going to be busy and nothing is going to change. That's what control based leadership does. It's an incubator for shame-based leadership. Resentment and the loss of highly committed employees at every level. Shame-based leadership, is what breeds gossip and an internal lack of control. And absolutely no wins. No wins, no motivation, no inspiration, nothing. Shame makes me feel not enough. So what's the point? We gotta let go of that. We gotta let go of the fear tactics And honestly, if you think about senior living as a whole, all the calls that we're on and the pressure that's given to us The threatening statements that happen sometimes, whether or not people are aware that they're doing this or not. These are shame-based leadership tactics. Whereas if you go to an influence based, you're looking at the potential of people and so you're building them up, whether in a controlled based leadership, you're making them feel bad that they didn't live up to an expectation that maybe wasn't even communicated. Some warning signs of control based leaders. you often address entire teams as if everyone is the problem. This is really important to pull out control based leaders, talk to a team in a room, as if the entire team is the problem. when you're in a room and you're training and you're having like your all associate meeting or you have to have a hard meeting. I think it's really important to always talk to the people who listen and who do a great job, because what happens then is you influence the room in a positive way. And you're speaking to the potential of what could be. Whereas when we speak to the entire room because one bad Apple made a bad choice, all of a sudden everybody feels shame. Everybody feels controlled and nobody feels seen. And in fact, we're starting to build that resentment, especially when people call out and you start talking to the people who actually showed up. In a way that you should be talking to the people who called out. They are getting the brunt of your frustration, and they didn't deserve it, nor did they earn it. It's a really powerful way. to bring this home, make an effort to speak to the potential of people in big meetings so you can influence the room up instead of drag the energy down. There are obviously meetings that have to be had after bad decisions and different circumstances that we have to discuss the hard things. But when you speak about it in an influential, positive, real way, you're going to get more of an impact than you would than if you were just talking to everybody as if everybody made the mistake. Control based communication will create compliance, but it will not create connection, and that's important. Compliance will work short term, but it doesn't necessarily extend out long term. It's exhausting. It's unsustainable and honestly inside senior living. It's ineffective in our workforce today. I feel like if this feels like where you are, I want you to know I'm not judging you. I've been there. I've certainly led this way. I've been managed this way, but. There is a better way forward, and that's the point of this influence is where we wanna go. the next phase up the ladder is going to be management based leadership. And management based leadership is not necessarily, I decide it is. I direct, and I think most of us spend our time here in management. We recognize that the only thing that we can truly control is our choices, but we also begin to see that we can control our commitment by making decisions rooted in our own values, vision, and personal integrity. I believe that commitment is what separates success from failure and management based leadership. You can start creating connection here and connection leads to commitment. If you can connect people's actions with the impact, you've got influence, you've got connection, you've got commitment, you've got a positive outcome, and hopefully you've got trust so you can let them go and they can do the right thing. Most people default to control based leadership, not because it works, but because they fear failure. But without failure, we know that there's no real success. We know that every opportunity, every problem to solve, every complaint that comes our way is an opportunity to grow and learn and lead our teams in doing things better. But they have to prove that they can. A growth culture, one that allows the space to make mistakes, evaluate it, and then learn from it is how you're gonna create freedom and influence inside of your community. Management based leadership feels comfortable. It does feel comfortable. It's where most of us operate. I direct you, I'll tell you what to do. You just go and do it, right? It keeps the community running. It maintains order and ensures stability, but things can be better. You know? It's better than control based. But you are still having to hear your name a lot. You're still having to direct people and solve the problems. We want it to be better, and that is how we're gonna move from managing to influencing. And it starts with us. It starts with rewiring how we think about leadership. Embracing discomfort as a part of growth because it is growing, is certainly uncomfortable Growing pains are real. And it starts with a willingness to step beyond control. And here's this five little letter word, again, trust, step out of control and start trusting your people. If you can go from, I decide to I direct and you can trust them, that they're gonna come to you, they're gonna do the work, and then they're gonna give you feedback, you can start trusting them more. Management based is like delegating tasks. And as we go into influence based leadership, it's delegating tasks and authority. So influence based leadership is where the success and the freedom lies. And I will tell you, when you work for a profession that is 365 days a year, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, freedom. Means different things than just freedom. We're, creating more freedom for you. We're not creating freedom for you,'cause we all have responsibilities inside of our community. But influence based leadership shifts your focus from control to connection because relationships become the top priority. This is where you get to create a community that is truly a great place to live and work that will attract great people to want to work inside of your community so you can develop a team that sees their role as being vital to the success of the team, right? The success of a team are the collective strengths of the team members together, That is what success looks like in an influential based leadership community. The approach is different. Again, you go back, and when you go into meetings, you speak into others, what you see in them, you help them take ownership of their departments or roles. You connect their actions to their impact. They see why they need to do a certain thing. Hmm, and what the result is, and they're like, oh, I wanna keep doing that because I see the benefit of it. And you ensure that people and policies work together and never against each other. You don't wanna hoard all the information and the knowledge. You want to give it out, and you want to build people up. Empowering others is where freedom is made. You let go of control and you empower others to make decisions, and then you support them along the way. Influence gets its power through the strength and the collaboration of the team. You embrace your strengths, the strengths of others, and leverage them together. Now, I am an elderly millennial folks. Do you remember Captain Planet? Captain Planet became Captain Planet when all the powers combined into one, It is when the collective came together, intentionally delivered their strengths. For the result of the better good That is the type of influence that we want inside of our communities. That is what truly makes a great place to live and work. When your team believes this, your growth. Starts working on autopilot. And I know this sounds really like, you know, pie in the sky. For some of us, and maybe some of you already have this, but I genuinely created teams that had this kind of flow inside of them, I worked at four different communities, and honestly, the teams that I had at each community impacted my life in such a vital way. And each stage of my life, they were so pivotal to my own personal development, but it wasn't a piece of cake. I mean, there were team members that turned over in certain departments all the time, and we all had to pitch in in those areas to different degrees. But even when one or two managers were a constant revolving door, the rest of us were a tight knit group. And I wanna say, I talk a lot about what I do wrong because I think that's certainly more interesting than what I did. Right? But something that I'm very proud of myself in my leadership is knowing what I was good at and what I wasn't, and allowing culinary directors. To be very creative. You have a budget, you have your order guide. You know where you have to order your food. Go create magic, right? Do something that lights your fire because whatever lights your fire, the residents are gonna enjoy the activity program the same way. I did have a little struggle in relieving a little bit of control over to the sales and marketing directors.'cause I do generally like sales and marketing. But when I found someone who could connect on every level and problem solve, I had to step out and become a supporting character instead of the main character in the sales and marketing efforts. And when I had a director of nursing that could solve problems, answer calls, keep the regs up to date, and then tell me what she was doing to solve the problems, I had to step back and let her be that person. And there were moments where I didn't want to, and there were moments that I struggled and there were moments that I picked back up the control bag when I should have just let it go. And there are moments that I was so thankful that I could walk away because I had an amazing team. But it starts with me as a leader and do I see potential? Am I building them up? And am I giving them the opportunity to get it wrong in a safe environment where I'm gonna teach them how to get it right, and I had to be okay with it being just okay. For the next few episodes, I really wanna deep dive more into influence based leadership and how to shift from control to influence. And so we're gonna spend, my solo episodes going over how to shift from control based Leadership to influence based leadership. And the next episode we're gonna talk about how really we as a leader can use questions to help us shift our mindset, I believe questions. Or what helps people own their department and it helps us stay in check to not rush to solutions, but to offer support and strategies for them to find their own solutions to their problems. So stay tuned for the solo episodes in the month of May, we're gonna dive more into this and. Of course, I wanna remind you about my new Executive Director Leadership Playbook that's out, getting a lot of great positive feedback. And if you wanna be in our leadership accelerator, to support this course and to support your mentorship, I want to invite you. Please feel free to email me. It's Erin Thompson at Aspire For more with erin.com and we will talk about everything that this accelerator offers. Until then. I want you to think about this. Leadership isn't about doing more. It's about influencing more and inspiring your team to grow because influence begins when control ends and leadership grows when trust starts. Freedom isn't free, but it is worth it every time. Short term discomfort for long term sustainability is a payoff that you're willing to spend. I promise you. Thank you for your time. As always, aspire for more for you and I'll look for you the next time.