How To Be Mentally Prepared for Career Advancement
Home > Podcast
“Power is a distorted volume knob. Everything coming up is muted. Everything going down is amplified.” – Sabina Nawaz
In this episode of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with speaker and leadership strategist Sabina Nawaz on what leaders need to know to better mentally prepare themselves for career advancement.
A few reasons why she is awesome — she is a leadership strategist, speaker, and executive coach who helps high-potential leaders mentally prepare for advancement. She’s got a TEDx talk under her belt You’ve seen her articles in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company, and others. And she has a new book you should pick up: You’re the Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need)
Connect with Sabina and learn more about her work…
LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE
Russel Lolacher: And on the show today, we have Sabina Nawaz, and here is why she is awesome. She’s a leadership strategist, speaker and executive coach who helps high potential leaders mentally prepare for advancements. She empowers leaders to rise with intention. Ready, not just for the role, but for the responsibility.
She’s got a TEDx talk under her belt. You may have seen her articles in Howard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company and others. And of course, she’s got a brand new spanking book that you should pick up called. You are the boss, become the manager you wanna be and others need. Hello Sabina.
Sabina Nawaz: Russel, great to be here. Looking forward to our conversation.
Russel Lolacher: Absolutely. Uh, I always love a conversation that involves preparation, that involves mentally shifting and becoming a little bit more aware of the situation we’re putting ourselves in. This is a bit of a spoiler that Sabina and I are gonna be talking about mentally preparing and the dangers of moving up in an organization.
But before we get to any of that, we have our regular question we have to ask, which is Sabina, what is your best or worst employee experience?
Sabina Nawaz: Hmm. Well, it is the experience of an employee who used to report to me. I was a lousy manager at Microsoft, but that also wasn’t always the case. So when I managed software teams, most of the people on my team told me I was the best boss they’d ever had. And then I moved on to run Microsoft’s management development.
Things were going great. I went on parental leave and everything changed on the first day. I’m getting back to work, putting on lipstick for the first time. My assistant Lori calls me frantic. Where are you? Steve expects you In 30 minutes, Lori starts to read me the memo that I’m supposed to discuss with Steve Bomber, the CEO of Microsoft, as I hit warp speed somewhere on the on-ramp to the freeway and Russel that set the pace and tone for my return to work. Inbox, overflowing Calendar, jam packed Infant at home. No sleep, no peace. No patience. I am sure that sounds familiar to a lot of people. And I went overnight from being caring and nurturing to being snippy and short, still five foot, three short, but also short-tempered. I started to micromanage, uh, rushing to meet deadlines.
I had no time to provide detailed explanations, let alone repeat them. And whenever somebody came to my office, I would leave all 10 fingers on the keyboard and look over my shoulder indicating I’m super busy. You’re less important than me. Spit it out and move on. The worst part of this was I thought I was being efficient until my colleague Joe comes by and says, Zach is crying in his office because of what you said. And that was the moment where shame just coarsed through my body. My whole body turns hot. I can no longer make eye contact with Joe, and I think to myself. How did I go from being caring and nurturing and compassionate to this, to someone who people apparently fear and really don’t like? So I drink a glass of water.
I walk across the hallway to Zach’s office and ask him if he’ll go for a walk with me. And as we go for the walk a minute in, I say, I am so sorry. Uh, there is no excuse for how I behaved in that meeting
And Zach’s eyes brim with tears, and it is in this moment of connection that I realize this is what I want to do to treat people with humanity. But what happens, and what I write about in my book as well, is that it is not power that corrupts us. It is pressure that corrupts us and that pressure causes us to act in these ways. It makes best boss ever to become the boss from hell. I have so much empathy for managers who are living with tremendous amounts of pressure. The higher we go, the more pressure we have. So how do we, how do we turn that pressure? It’s not the enemy, it’s the test. How do we turn that? How do we harness that Pressure doesn’t have to define you. It can refine you if you learn how to make yourself pressure. Proof.
Russel Lolacher: Completely agree, and I’m really excited to sort of dig into that pressure and the power and the perception of, of everything when it comes to moving up an organization. But I’m super curious about the story because there’s a few aspects of it that I find super interesting. One, the fact that Zach was crying because, and I, and I don’t mean that, that’s not a judgment thing, that’s that’s a reaction, but there are so many people that don’t physically manifest their frustrations.
Sabina Nawaz: Yes.
Russel Lolacher: Like you saw that you had impact, but there are so many employees, bad leaders don’t see that are vibrating or they take it out when they get
Sabina Nawaz: Yes.
Russel Lolacher: So those leaders or managers, ’cause they’re not being leaders really in those situations, are not aware of their impacts because they don’t see it with their eyes.
Um, there’s other impacts, of course, we both know around retention and, and, and mental health and so forth, but at least you had a physical representation to know. This equals this. This is horrible. But there’s so many leaders that don’t know that. The other piece that I really like, the piece that I did like was that you did have psychological safety with another staff member for them to tell you that that was a situation and that you were the cause of it.
So many. If you were a scary leader to everybody, no way in hell would anybody tell you that this was going on. They would say, well, I guess Zach’s having a bad day. It must be something else. Or they wouldn’t mention it, or they wouldn’t make any eye contact. So there are a lot of pros and cons even to that scenario that I don’t think is uh, the same situation for everybody.
And I think a lot of leaders may need to do a little bit more work to understand their impacts.
Sabina Nawaz: bet. You bet. And I think one of the reasons Joe brought it up to me is that he did not report to me. He was a peer of mine, so I think it gave him a little bit more leeway to raise that because people. Did seem afraid of me. Uh, and yes, you’re exactly right. I was fortunate that A, somebody had raised it with me and B, that there was an actual external manifestation.
As we know, you and I know research shows when bosses treat employees poorly, they go even deliberately make mistakes just to get back at the. And we have, we are the last ones to find out, because while, while pressure corrupts power divides and that divide, no one is speaking up across that divide because nobody wants to tell the person in a position of power what they don’t wanna hear,
Russel Lolacher: Today we’re getting into advancement. We’re getting into, um, the dangers of advancement and sort of the mental. Preparation a leader will need to do. But I like to dial back a bit and really do a little defining of things. When you are talking about advancement or what are you talking about, what, how would you define advancement?
Is it just taking the job for more money? Is it more responsibility? Is there more to it? I know it seems like an obvious answer, but I just, I wanna understand what we’re mentally preparing ourselves for.
Sabina Nawaz: Hmm, there are Well, what I find interesting in that question, Russell and I love it, is there are so many different reasons why we think we want to advance. And they’re very different from when we arrived there. So there’s this big disconnect, and this happened to me, this happened to me even before I advanced where I thought I was going to advance. Uh, so is it okay if I share a little
story about that? Yeah. Um, when I was running engineering teams, I went on sabba. Um, Microsoft allows you to do that, and for eight weeks, a large part of that time, I was just sitting around doing nothing, which was the first time in my life. And as research shows, when we sit around doing nothing or when we’re in the shower, we’re exercising, we’re commuting. These bolts of insight arrive in our brains, and that happened to me. I suddenly realized with a flash of clarity that it would no longer be a matter of if, but when that I would become a corporate vice president in the company. Now, this was what I had wanted to do in terms of advancement. I’d been preparing myself, not just mentally, but work-wise, working super hard, learning the ropes, getting mentored, et cetera. But the moment I realized that I could get there, I didn’t want it. I didn’t want it, and it was the most anticlimactic moment of my life, which was, if I already know how to get there, why should I spend the next five years of my life getting there?
It was the difference between becoming and being the become, become, become, get this thing. So, so be careful what you are asking for, what you’re wanting and why you’re wanting it. I think some of that was the programming I grew up with. You know, as a woman, as an immigrant, as a, as a brown woman in the tech world, it, it seemed like the natural progression to advance.
Russel Lolacher: Right.
Sabina Nawaz: This is no different from many of my clients, it north of 40. Many of them come to me saying, is this all there is? And I say, what do you mean, say more? And they’re like, well, you know, I’ve got the house, I’ve got the spouse, I’ve got the, the title, the, the budget, the I’ve, I’ve done so much and everything that I thought was success is in my grasp and I feel empty.
Russel Lolacher: Right.
Sabina Nawaz: And that’s when we go to the Joy Line tool that’s in my book. When you lose the plot, you lose true purpose and meaning. You’ve, you’ve chased all these things because you thought you should, as opposed to what you really, really want and what gives you meaning and purpose.
Russel Lolacher: So thank you for that. Uh, uh, it really feels like if you want to define advancement, you kind of have to do it for yourself and even, because it could be a lateral move, but it could be completely different responsibility. You have a direct line to executive. It could be many, many different things, but you kind of have to define success for what you
Sabina Nawaz: exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
Russel Lolacher: So you’ve touched, you’ve touched on a bit from your book in pressure, power, perception. I don’t wanna dig into that a little bit more because this is the dangers we’re talking about when it comes to advancement and I’m, I’m really curious as to some of these landmines that we really need to better understand.
Go, please explain, tell, tell me about them.
Sabina Nawaz: uh, well, so with pressure. Pressure is like the silent corruptor. It affects all of us. It’s everywhere. It’s constant, and it doesn’t just push us, it wars. It changes how we act. Think about the last time you were under pressure. Maybe you were running late to something and somebody cut you off in traffic. What did you do? All of us, all of us face pressure, especially in today’s day and age, and all of us at some point or the other, not always, not all the time, but with great regularity, have acted in ways that we’re not proud of. Whether or not that results in a Zach crying or us seeing the external manifestation of it, we would probably wilt if our actions were caught on video. And so we fall into these pressure pitfalls that are these dangers, these traps, and I’ll get more into the details of those in a moment. It’s a dual force with power because if pressure is the silent, corrupter power is the great divider. It creates a distance between us and everyone else. And the minute you become a boss, the room shifts.
People are no longer willing to be fully honest with you. You are every. Joke is funny enough to land you on. Canada’s got talent. Uh, your, your every idea is worthy of a TED talk. So how do you create a, a space where those power gaps don’t become these yawning MAs across which there is misunderstanding, miscommunication, missed deadlines that risk entire projects or your entire organization. So we’ve got these pressure pitfalls and these power gaps. Now, one of the most common pressure pitfalls is one I call the sole provider. That’s SOLE, where we think we are the only ones who. We can do it better than anyone else. That’s your straight A student. Guilty. We can do it faster than anybody else, so I might as well just jump in and do it instead of trying to explain it to someone else. Also guilty. We can be the caretaker. Oh, my team is under a lot of pressure right now. It’s best for me to take it on. We can be that whack-a-mole champ. I wanna whack down my to-do list and even something that I’ve already done, I wanna put on the to-do list, just so I have the pleasure of crossing it off. Guilty. So as human beings, we jump in and we wanna take on the world. That of course, creates a lot of pressure on ourselves. It creates a repeat cycle because now we become the sole provider and everybody’s coming to us for the answer, which can also be very seductive. And it creates pressure on everybody else because now they’re all waiting for you, waiting on you, watching what kind of mood you’re on in because of the pressure you’re under. And it stunts their growth, creativity, drive, potential ideas. So that’s a huge and very, very common pressure pitfall. Uh, I can give you an example of a power gap if that’s helpful or.
Russel Lolacher: Sure. Yeah. No, I mean, and any clarity helps. Absolutely. Yeah.
Sabina Nawaz: Yeah. And power gaps are again, that distance that’s created when we have power. Um, a very common power gap is when we fall into the trap of the singular story. The more successful we are, the higher up we go. We’ve gotten there, not by being wrong a lot, but by being right a lot, and that reinforces. A mental mindset that says, my idea is the idea and it’s right. And of course, the higher you go up in power, it also reinforces a mental mindset of everybody around you that says, yes, boss. That is the idea. And it is a great idea. So a, a, a cue that you’re in this power gap. Of a singular story is when nobody ever disagrees with you and you’re the only one bringing up new ideas. What? What can we do with this power gap? Well, one of the things you could do is make up multiple meanings. So you jump to a conclusion and you say, this challenge is happening because of this reason. Pause and encourage others. To say, I would like three other reasons that are completely different from this before we move forward and take any action. And suddenly it expands the worldview in and the options that you have accessible because you’ve paused for a moment to say, what is really going on here?
Russel Lolacher: So we’re looking at the landmines that get us through this, the power, the, the, the pressure of these larger things. But I’m, I’m trying to, I, I wanna flip it back on us because. We need to prepare for this. We need self-awareness is huge. Situational awareness is huge. So you’ve really broken down what the situation is.
This is what you’re getting into. These are the pitfalls of what can happen. So as we both know, there’s no training for leaders. It’s bums in seats. It is, we need to fix a problem. So we’re gonna get that person to fill that role. Oh, hope you don’t fail. Succeed on your own. Like there’s nothing when it comes to.
And then, and then when the training starts at the executive level, which that ship has sailed, they’ve already been rewarded for being up there, not for being good leaders, but for delivering at that point. So what can we do as leaders? Because as leaders who are moving up the organization, we become less human, we become less accessible, uh uh, um, accessible to others, less relatable.
Um, not to your point, not anything we’re maybe doing, but it’s just we’re getting busier. We’re prioritizing busy over humans,
Sabina Nawaz: gosh, yes.
Russel Lolacher: right? More and more in that tends to happen, profile money, so forth. So how do we know that our values are shifting? How do we become more aware that our priorities are shifting even subconsciously, because it might be happening.
Sabina Nawaz: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. What a great question. Uh, and there’s so much packed into that. We, how much time do we have to talk? I feel like I, we can, we can talk for hours on this, so to, to make that into a capsule. Three things. First of all, self-care. Uh, the CEOs I coach, we work on what is your job description, and they write up a draft, and then we, we work through it. And I say, you know, the number one thing in your job description is missing. What’s that? Self-care. Self-care is not just nice to have. It is a must have. It is not just for you. It is for the business and for the people in the entire organization. Because if you are going to work, hangry, if you are going to work and going into a meeting, this happened to a client of mine. Who, uh, behaved rather badly and lost his cool, uh, where he shouldn’t have after flying in straight from a red eye, not even having had time to eat and going straight into this meeting. Naturally his, his self-control and self-awareness eroded. So we. Just put together a simple rule with his admin that says, don’t book meetings after a red eye flight. Uh, at least three hours, four hours after red eye flight, so he’s had time to eat. Take a shower, perhaps take a little nap, and so know your triggers and take care of yourself first. That, that would be like physical hungers and things like that. The second thing you can do is be aware of your emotional hungers. What does that mean? Well, as human beings, you, you, a rule to have is to not go to work hungry. And here’s what I mean by that. When you go to the grocery store hungry, what ends up, what ends up in your basket?
Russel Lolacher: Oh, it’s sugar. I gotta stay awake. I gotta stay motivated. I gotta keep moving.
Sabina Nawaz: Yes. So yours is sugar minus sugar and salt. Ketchup chips and salted caramels. Right. And when we go to work hungry, hungry for praise, affirmation, belonging, safety, superiority, relevance, wanting to look like a hero or wanting to appear like a martyr. All those hungers also make us indulge in junk behaviors and it’s human nature to crave these reassurances. But when we go to work hungry, we sacrifice connection, we add more pressure on other people, and we damage productivity, especially when you’re the boss. So recognize what are these inner hungers in you and how might you go get that satisfied in healthier ways? I had a client who really, really wanted a lot of affirmation. And you know what? The people around you figure that out. And they can divert you from holding them accountable by just slathering on the praise. And you go, oh yeah, tell me more. And before you know it, the meeting is done and they’ve left without any action items that needed, they needed to walk away with. So in her case, she actually decided to take theater classes. And was very good, um, in improv theater classes, and she was very good on the fly. She started doing really well there, and she got her pats on the back, her kudos through that. So when she went to work, she was more sated and not allowing her inner hungers to distract her from it. The third piece is to ask for feedback, but to ask for feedback in a way that gets you quality input, because it’s a, it’s a little bit of a bind, right? If no one’s gonna tell you the truth, how are you gonna get it? Now, if you just say, how did I do? Of course they’re gonna go, you did a great job, boss.
Fantastic. Even though they’ve started a secret group chat about how badly you sucked.
So. The quality of the feedback you receive is directly proportional to the quality of question you ask. Make it specific and make it small. What’s one thing? What’s one thing I did well in that meeting? What’s one thing if I did more of or less of would make that go even better?
Russel Lolacher: I also find a lot of those that move up in the organization perpetuate the ecosystem that allows them to perpe to, to be separate. So I remember doing a keynote, uh, talk, and there was this executive in the back who had his arms crossed the whole time. I’m like, oh, good. You’re receptive and. Immediately after I’m done talking, he’s like, well, how am I supposed to understand how my organization’s working?
Only two people will talk to me. I’m like, lemme guess you’re your, they’re your two admin staff, right? He’s like, yeah, how did you know? Because you never leave your office. You only apparently are safe or, or a safe space to the two people that are closest to you. You are perpetuating the problem because your in your ivory tower.
And you’re allowing it to be your ivory towel because it feeds your ego or it feeds your, I’m busy. I don’t have time. Do do.
Sabina Nawaz: yes.
Russel Lolacher: So as a, a leader or executive or someone who’s moved up, how do you stop yourself from perpetuating the problem? Because you want the, to your, to your point, the emotional hunger of, but I get the cool office that’s separated from everybody else, so I get the, ’cause I worked my ass off for
Sabina Nawaz: Yeah. I deserve it.
Russel Lolacher: I deserve this. I’ve got a big window. Why should I walk a different floor that nobody’s ever seen me on? That’s not where the elevator goes. That goes to my office. So, but at the same time, there is those admin staff that are keeping people away from them. There is the, like there is this built up there on a different floor than everybody else, or a different building than everybody else.
There is physical representations of this ecosystem. How do you break that
Sabina Nawaz: Mm mm Yeah, I, I, and I, I agree with you. I’ve seen that so many times. And, um, uh, there’s a great, uh, quote in, um, the book. Anxious people, which says, uh, rich people buy themselves space, you know, bigger seat on the airplane, et cetera. So exactly what you’re talking about, Russel, one of the things you can do is, of course. This is assuming you, you are ready to, and you want to do this, but if you are thinking why is nobody, why is nobody showing initiative? Why is nobody coming to talk to me? You have an inkling that the, the, the problem might start with you because everything you say is going to be hugely amplified. Power is a, is a distorted volume knob. Everything coming up is muted. Everything going down is amplified, so. Every little, you know the person you’re talking about who’s sitting like this with their arms crossed, of course, everyone else is suddenly going to sit with their arms crossed because that’s what’s the norm. That’s what’s done here, and it conveys certain messages.
It doesn’t matter that you were doing that because you were cold. That’s not how they’re going to see it. So. For me, this would be around the communication fault lines that I talk about and all these, these fissures open up when we don’t take the care and time to communicate well. So you can absolutely have your corner office and you can be approachable. One way to do this would be to. To, to shut up and I, I have this four step exercise on exercising your shut up muscle. Two of those are be the third or fourth person to speak. When you are the first person to speak, especially from your high perch, no one else is going to put put in ideas. No one else is going to be as creative or do their best work. And guess what? You are the one who’s losing out the most. You are the one who’s losing out the most, not them, because you will not know what’s truly going on. You will not be able to harness the power of the collective intelligence in your organization. So if you are the third, fourth, or fifth person to speak, now others have some space to explore, to brainstorm, to ideate. And another part of exercising your shut up muscle. Because what gets most in the way is, but I have this brilliant idea. Oh, they don’t know I’ve been here before. Let me interrupt. Well, instead of interrupting them, interrupt your note taking with what I call margin notes in the margin, jot down your own ideas so you can put, put them out there. But later in the meeting, and only if others haven’t already shared them. It is very seductive to our hungers, to our desires to get flattered into, uh, a position where you’re the only one speaking, and pretty soon you’re the hardest working person in the room. Talk about extra pressure.
Russel Lolacher: Ego wants to fill space. It wants to, if there’s a gap in the conversation, it’s not about, and then going to another person, it’s, I have something to add. I have something to add. And all I’ve seen, I love that you said the third or fourth person, because I’ve seen it in meetings where one person will talk and then the, the, the.
Executive or leader will have to add something to it. Then another person will, and the executive has to like, you’re just undermining everything anybody is saying because you’re not giving them the space for the ideas to breathe. For them to be
Sabina Nawaz: Exactly. And a tactic you could use in that case is Russel just, just shared something. I’m curious, who else has, has a thought about that and then shut up again.
Russel Lolacher: Facilitator. Be a facilitator. Don’t, yeah. Take over. I I just before we move on to some of the impacts this could have on our teams, I have one more question is how do we, what are practices we might be doing, because this is great in the workplace, but I’m also thinking we’re not in the workplace. We’re at home a lot of the time, preparing to go to work in the morning, and I’m thinking, is it journaling?
Is it meditation, is it not? Everything works for everybody.
Sabina Nawaz: Yes,
Russel Lolacher: I feel like there needs to be some self work. You said self care, but self work to get our mind right, to even prepare to defend boundaries and all these
Sabina Nawaz: yes. Beautiful. Well, the first thing is most of us have trained our bosses, uh, to respond to things the minute we wake up. And there is a boundary there that is the most negotiable boundary, which is, do you have to respond at 5:00 AM could you respond at 7:00 AM sure. But you’ve trained, trained everyone to expect to hear from you at 5:00 AM. And it’s hard to swing from five to seven all of a sudden. So my favorite, one of my favorite tools is Micro Habits.
Do identify what that thing is for you that you wanna do in preparation. Let’s say it is about pushing out the time when you go online before you go to work instead of five, your micro habit might be 5:01 AM. And you just stick to 5:01 AM for longer than you think until you’re ready to go to 5 0 2. So over time, you can have a transformational experience, but you start in very, very, very tiny micro increments. Often thinking about a morning ritual of some sort is super helpful. Again, people will say, but I don’t have time. However, if you do it in the form of a micro habit, you do. So let’s say you think, I really wanna go to the gym, but I don’t have time to go for 30 minutes. You don’t have to go for 30 minutes. Let’s take you off the hook for that. What if you did one pushup? One pushup. Now, the minute I suggest that to people, they start laughing and that’s when I know they have hit the micro level.
They’ve hit the right bar. It’s a low bar, which is counter to us thinking about putting up high bars, and this is proven through psychology. If we’re successful at it at that low bar, which we’re much more likely to be successful at, we’re more motivated to do it the next day as opposed to our New Year’s resolutions where we write entire books of fiction that never get realized. So whatever it is you’re gonna do to prepare, do it in a very tiny way. I like to say that I have a daily meditation practice, and here’s what I do to prepare for my day. I take in one mindful inhale and one mindful exhale. That is my daily meditation practice. And you know what? It still helps because in my mind I’m going, okay, I’m getting fully present. I have a big smile on my face. Boom. Voila. I’m ready to step into my office
Russel Lolacher: Thank you for that. I, I, I really feel like we talk about the workplace and what we need to do in the workplace, but there’s things we need to be doing outside the workplace before we turn on that computer, before we walk through those doors that I don’t know if it gets talked about enough. There’s no such thing as work life.
It’s just life, and we have to focus on these things. But when we move up, there’s other dangers that I don’t know if we talk about enough, because we’re talking about our own, um, dangers in advancement, but there are ripple effects. There are people around us, teams we’re responsible for that may not be accepting of these changes or understanding of some of these changes.
So as a leader who’s getting or, or as a, as a person moving up in the organization, we’ve talked about pressure, but when you have pressure and you don’t process it. If you have pressure and you’re not recognizing it, what’s the impact to your teams by doing this? What’s the impact to those? You work with you because you are feeling pressure, but you are just moving through it.
Sabina Nawaz: Yeah. Yeah. I, it’s like, it’s like the Zacks of the world. The impact is, gosh, this person, because we love to make up stories about the person in position of power and specifically what they’re thinking about us. And whatever they’re thinking about us is generally more dire, more urgent and directed. Targeted at us. So when a boss just says, Hey, can we chat on Monday? And they say that throw, throw that out casually to you on a Friday, there goes your weekend. And there goes your acid reflux. So, uh, and perhaps kicking that dog under the table. So the impact is huge on people because it comes with a gale force, a tsunami force. Any, any casual comments, what can you do about it? One of the tools we unpack. I unpack in the book, it’s called Mapping, and this is giving people a sense of the person that you are and how to read that better instead of them making up all these catastrophic stories about you. So give them a clue, give them a decoder on what are some of your physical. Common physical nonverbal characteristics. What about the time of day? What about the modes of communication? How do you like to work? For example, you could say, when I frown, it means I’m actually thinking so frowning is my thinking face. It’s not because I dislike what you’re saying. You could say, I tend to look down once in a while when we’re on screen because I’m taking notes. On what you’re saying now, you could ideally, actually, you can angle your camera in a way so people can see that you’re taking notes instead of checking out your phone, which is of course, a constant temptation. You could say, I’m not a morning person, don’t schedule meetings with me before 10. Or if you see me in the coffee room and I don’t respond, I just grunt.
It’s because I’m not sentient until my second cup of venti Americano. You could say, send me small texts with little requests and individual questions. Or you could say, send me one digest in a day with everything that you need from me. So if you can map out the terrain of you for other people, particularly under pressure, they’re not then making up different stories about what’s going on or, oh, I’m on the verge of getting fired, and they can be more productive in what they need to get done so that they can reduce the pressure you’re under.
Russel Lolacher: Transparency to fight perception.
Sabina Nawaz: yes.
Russel Lolacher: I like that a lot because trust is a huge thing as as we try to establish those relationships as we move up. But that gets me to another danger that I’m thinking about as we move up in an organization. titles change, our paychecks may change, but we’ve made relationships as we’ve moved.
Like we’re, if we’re, we’ve built a great team, we have great relationships, we move to another team, we’re starting new relationships. Didn’t we have relationships with that former team? Shouldn’t that be maintained? Or should it be like, I don’t have to worry about you anymore. I’m more and more important every single day.
So then, so I worry that that former team is now going, they don’t have any time for us. They think they’re too important. They’re, how do you keep those relationships going even while your titles are
Sabina Nawaz: Yes, and yes. So let’s say, and it could be a former team or it could be your team has expanded. So you’ve got this team and now you’ve got five other teams with you.
How do you keep those relationships and while not feeding a perception of favoritism?
Because it’s sort of darned if you do, and darned if you don’t wrestle, you maintain the relationships and then go, oh look, they’re spending more time with their former team, uh, that or the first team, and instead of all us newbies who’ve come along, this also comes across as an issue when you are now the boss of a peer. All of these are fraught and important to be mindful towards. You are always in relationship, even when you’re not. You’re in relationship, not the kind of relationship you want. This will sound weird, but for some of my clients, the only way they can keep track of this is mechanistically. The good intention of, oh, we’ll stay in touch.
It’s like some of your friends or acquaintances where you go, yeah, we should get together for lunch someday. And then before you know it, 10 years have gone by and that someday hadn’t come until now. So some of them actually maintain a spreadsheet where they list out the key people they need to stay in touch with. How often they would like to stay in touch with them, and what mode is it sending them a text once a week? Is it lunch once a quarter? Is it something else? Is it a one-on-one meeting? And so on? So you cannot do that for an infinite number of relationships. But even doing that for, say, the 30 most important relationships that you need to stay in connection with now gives you a rubric through which you can manage that without it becoming. 59th priority. That’ll never happen.
Russel Lolacher: I like that. I like that a lot. I’m also thinking about how we can leverage those relationships because people have different perception of us. Like now that former team knows us in a, in a way that our new teams don’t, but that also fuels some possible good feedback. You could be getting going. You used to do this, now you do this.
How is that work? How do you create a space? For that feedback. I know we’ve talked about feedback a little bit already on, on the show, but I’m curious how you create a space for feedback because you need to leverage those relationships even as you’re moving up in the organization. And to your point, that power pushed distance against valuable feedback.
So what are we putting in place that allows for that better feedback from our
Sabina Nawaz: One of the things you can put in place is to ritualize the process of feedback as in repeat it over and over again. Because also when you first ask for feedback, you might not get some quality feedback, even if you’ve designed the questions really well, like we talked about. But if you keep asking over time, people realize you’re serious.
And of course, how you respond to that feedback. Generally speaking, just say thank you and move on. If you start to give explanations or answers, it just comes across all wrong. Somebody I work with has a practice consistently over, I think, maybe a dozen years now, at the end of every staff meeting, they reserve time for people to go around and answer the question, what is the last 10% you are not saying? Now does everybody go right down to the very last of that 10%? No. And nor should they, but it signals and openness, it brings up issues that otherwise would not have been brought up by creating that space.
Russel Lolacher: I mentioned early that there might be this systemic problem that perpetuates bosses to. Be bad because they are producing and they’re not being trained to be proper leaders. So now I’m super curious. What’s the organization’s role in providing a, this what we’re talking about, these boundary reinforcement, this better understanding of the pitfalls and to how to address them from a mindset.
This is all being thrown on the individual. Where’s the organization in this and where should the organization be in
Sabina Nawaz: Yeah. Wow. Yes, it is very much a systemic issue. It is because we get shaped by the pressures in the system from the outside in. We’re, we’re not stupid. We see where the wind is blowing and what gets rewarded, what gets not rewarded, who gets laid off, who doesn’t get laid off in today’s climate, and we’re gonna do things to perpetuate the culture that has been set in place. Some organizations do a great job with a lot of these things where they truly do focus more on the impact, the result of the work, as opposed to the FaceTime or the busy, as you said. I loved your point about that whole hiding behind busy or claiming busy as a, as a badge of success. Mm. Uh, you know, and people say, oh, you must be very busy.
I don’t wanna take up too much of your time. I say, yes, my time is precious. I’m not busy. I’m, I’m very mindful about how I use my time. So yes, do make good use of the time, but not because I’m busy, but because it’s precious. And, and so for organizations. How do they create space for people to actually do the work? And, uh, some great practices I’ve seen. There are, uh, times where they say, okay, Fridays are no meeting days, for example. So it doesn’t suck up all this time just in meetings where people go, oh, now I can start my real work after dinner because now my meetings are done. Unless I have meetings with someone in Asia across a time zone, you know, where I’ve got to work, even do meetings even at night. So can you create things like no meeting zones? Can you reward impact as opposed to busyness? Um, uh, I often ask people systemically when they’re, uh, creating performance management systems to encourage employees to communicate. Not the what, but the so what.
So if they can answer the so what question? Oh, what is, oh yeah, I ran around with my head cut off and did this and this and this and this. Mm. Okay. So what, so what, so what happened as a result of it? That’s what we really care about.
Russel Lolacher: And I think there’s also this big gap sometimes in what organizations will say they want versus how that they actually action behind it. For example, you know what? That’s right. Leaders should be able to say no. Teams should be able to set boundaries about their workloads and then provide no parameters or guardrails to allow them to do that.
It’s like, no, no, no. You can say no. Here’s another thing to do. Here’s another thing to do. Here’s an just piling on the busy. And while at the same time, preaching empowerment but not allowing for that to happen.
Sabina Nawaz: Mm-hmm.
Russel Lolacher: So I just, I feel like there’s a lot of organizations that will say one thing, here’s the values on the wall, here’s the mission and the vision.
But those leaders who are advancing going, I’m just trying to keep my head above water. I’m just trying to keep my team not from burning out and quitting on me. There needs to be sort of this middle ground. So that’s where I’m kind of getting to the point of. How can organizations better define mental emotional requirements?
Because you were talking about those hungers earlier, not just skill sets when it comes to what their expectations for those that are gonna lead the organization. I.
Sabina Nawaz: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Like almost, how do you build the mental toolbox systemically? Organizationally? Hmm. One would be that people at the highest level of the organization are comfortable being vulnerable themselves. Because back to the culture gets set at the top, the tone gets set at at the top. If you sit there with your arms crossed, everybody’s got their arms crossed and defended and defending and defensive. If you sit there open, open hearted and you say, you know, these are tough times, and I woke up at 3:00 AM yesterday with my brain on, on frantic pace worrying about this, that and the other thing, and. Sometimes I wonder if I’m the best person equipped to do this job, you know, or something that makes them vulnerable, that honestly shares what’s going on for them. It makes them more human, but it systemically makes the organization more human.
Russel Lolacher: I think it also speaks to a few things you mentioned in your book too, that we could be normalizing a bit like the small habits you were talking about. Building resilience, seeing our executive do those small things, take those pauses and go, oh, so that’s how a leader’s supposed to show up. The other one I’m curious about, you mentioned as well, is around being more focused on outcomes, not outputs.
And I know as an individual we may have to figure that out, but what does that look like? Normalized for an organization as well?
Sabina Nawaz: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So the kinds of questions you ask in a performance review system.
The metrics that you measure, can they be foc? Can they be more outcome focused? Now, sometimes that’s hard because here’s the other problem is we skew organizationally more towards the short term than the long term, and some outcomes are going to be much more long term based. As opposed to within that quarter or within that semester in which you’re getting performance managed. And so how do you create a system where you have some long-term goals and you carve out space for providing rewards on long-term efforts, seeds that are getting planted, knowing that that’ll get. More concrete.
The so what will be more concrete over time, but almost like creating a long-term corner of what are you doing to plant the seeds for the long term? That might have to be a what versus a so what conversation with an ideal. So what articulated that? That we won’t realize for a while. Uh, but carving out space for that is, is vitally important.
Otherwise we’re just doing the short term.
Russel Lolacher: So I wanna wrap it up with the question I kind of like to understand, which is someone’s listening to this right now and they’re like, I wanna move up in the organization. I have aspirations. I wanna, I want to be a better leader, a better boss, a better manager, um, in my advancement. What’s something I could start doing that I maybe I’m not doing right now that would better prepare me for advancement?
Where do they start that first? Dipping that toe in the
Sabina Nawaz: Yes. The best thing you can start doing is do nothing. is called blank Space. It’s a practice that many of my clients do. It’s carving out two hours in a week where you are offline, you’re not talking, you’re not reading, you’re not researching things. You’re simply being. Now that is very, very difficult for people to do sometimes.
So if, if you need some things, it could be, take all those ideas that you’ve started having over the week that you’ve collected in little sticky notes. Bring them with you to your blank space time. Make that away from home, away from work. You could be going on a walk. Uh, somebody I work with wanted to explore every pie shop in Seattle. So he would buy two pies in a new shop every, every week and sit and doodle. Uh, so you can, you can. Craft that design that space in different ways, but take time to unplug and do something, not to do anything in that blank space time. Uh, one of my clients had a major career shift as a result of that and is now an executive coach from, from having had a big operational role in a corporation. But that preparation, you talk a lot about that mental preparation happened by actually. Not doing anything, just creating the space and, and we often have the answers inside us. We are way more resourceful than we think we are. If we just allow that to come out in that blank space. It, it has the power to not only prepare us, but to transform us.
Russel Lolacher: Well, you know, this was a Canadian conversation ’cause you already snuck in uh, ketchup chips at one point. Uh, thank you very much. Sabina. Sabina NWA is a leadership strategist, speaker and executive coach. And she’s got herself a brand new book I would highly recommend you check out, which is called You are the Boss, Become The Manager You Wanna Be and Others Need.
Thank you so much for being here, Sabina.
Sabina Nawaz: Thank you very much, Russel.