Culture Focused Practice

Leadership is not innate. It's learned and it's practiced and it's built through failure and feedback and that lovely thing we all strive for self-awareness.

This is the Culture Focused Practice podcast. I am in fact, Dr. Tara Vossenkemper, and thank you for being here with me.

We're gonna talk all about the myth of the natural leader today. So there is this myth out there that some people are just, uh, basically natural born leaders.

But if we're looking at most leaders in group practice ownership or in group practice settings, and I would say honestly, in most businesses, leadership isn't something innate. It's, it's not found, it's forged. It is built through trial and error. It is built through learning by fire. It is built through a conscious and concerted effort to be better at something to learn and grow and evolve.

So this episode seeks to unpack how great leadership is really a discipline, not a genetic predisposition or a temperament tendency, and, from the way I look at it, why that should actually feel liberating rather than scary and confining.

So before we really get into it though, make sure you subscribe to the podcast. You'll get more episodes on leadership and culture and all of the messy middle ground in between being a human and being a leader to other humans.

And just to keep this, you know, structured for you, there's three agenda items on our docket today. Number one, the natural leader myth and where it came from. Number two, why leadership is learned and not innate. And number three, how to grow into leadership that actually fits you. I fucking love that so gd, much, let's go. I.

Agenda item number one, the natural leader myth and where it came from. Honestly, I feel like this is the cultural narrative in society. This is like the societal expectation is that there are these natural leaders, people with charisma, or who are especially gregarious, or they take charge and they grab the bull by the horns and. There's just something special about them.

You know, there's this weird like narrative, I don't know what other word for it. It just feels like a cultural narrative, some sort of script.

I always end up thinking though, about this notion that confidence has nothing to do with competence. People can be very, very confident and they can be gregarious and outspoken and really, you know, let's just say extroverted. And I'm very socially lively and I'm very socially bold and I have high social self-esteem, so I'm not hating on my extroverts for the record.

What I am saying though is that those traits do not equal competence in doing something. And I would argue that competence is actually more important in leadership than confidence.

So charisma, just to be very clear, is not leadership. These two do not equal the same thing. Gregariousness is not leadership. Extroverted tendencies are not leadership. They can be traits that some good leaders have, but when we see them in a person that does not automatically equal that this person is a very good leader or a natural leader.

They naturally take up a lot of space. Again, no fucking judgment 'cause I do the same thing. That doesn't make them a good leader.

And I would go further to say that that myth hides the actual work that it takes to become a good leader. Quality leadership, people who are good leaders are good at key things like emotional regulation. They're not gonna get ruffled anytime something doesn't go their way or they're not going to be frustrated if they have an employee that pushes back, or they're not going to panic in the face of chaos or crisis. Maybe they're able to regulate and stay grounded and still see what the vision is and the best track to move in that direction. They're still gonna chart the course towards their vision in the face of chaos, or maybe emotional dysregulation around them, like they're still able to stay grounded.

Secondly, it would be communication. Quality leaders are able to effectively communicate. When I say communicate, what really comes to mind for me is being as honest and accurate as possible with what you're saying in such a way that it can effectively land for the other person.

So communication can't take place without somebody who's receptive to listening and to hearing what it is that you have to say. But as a person who is communicating, it's my responsibility to use language and tone and probably some sort of like nonverbal cue or nonverbal cues, plural, to try to make sure that my message is received in the way that I'm intending it to be received.

Communication is absolutely a learned skill, and people across the board think they're really great at it and most people are not. And this could also just be reflective of me having high standards with language or being very particular about the way that I try to say things and whether or not it's accurate to what it is that I'm intending to say. I still contend that effective and healthy communication is a necessary component to healthy and effective leadership.

And then the third piece for quality leaders is accountability. Good leaders will take ownership of what they've done wrong, especially. They will own up to their mistakes. They're gonna say, I fucked that up. That's my bad. I shouldn't have done this. I could have done this instead. I'm gonna do this differently next time. It's accountability.

If you are hiding behind defenses, or you think that to be a good leader, you can't make a mistake. You are in fact mistaken didn't. You can make mistakes and you should own up to them when you do.

So then instead of thinking about again this sort of myth like gregarious, charismatic, extroverted people are the best leaders. We can think about it as emotionally regulated or grounded, accurately and healthily, communicative, and accountable people are the best leaders. Those are the things that we can build and strive towards in order to be the best leaders that we can be.

Notice how none of them have to do with extroversion versus introversion. So immediately we are basically contending with that myth by nature of what actually is required to be a good leader.

What I'm hoping this does is allow for people who are early in this process and maybe who have only just started thinking about leadership as a skill or haven't at all, and are listening to this and realizing, oh fuck, like I can train myself and become a better leader. Sweet. Let's do that.

If you are in that camp, my hope is that you can stop assuming that you should know how to lead and that you should know what you're doing and that you should have all the answers and that you should, what the hell ever else you're telling yourself about being a good leader, and instead, have some grace with yourself and see yourself in a developmental process and developmentally progressing through iterations of your leadership.

That's what this is. That's what we can start to integrate in order to allow ourselves to evolve into the best leaders that we can be. And I'm saying allow ourselves to evolve. I should actually say intentionally evolve into the best leaders that we can be. Allow ourselves, feels very like passive and like, I have no ownership over this thing. I can't do anything to help it. But the reality is opposite of that, we can do things to help it. And we do have ownership over the process, at least to some extent.

Let's just keep following this vein. So if we're going down this track of we can evolve intentionally into better leaders, then we are at agenda item number two, which is that leadership is learned, not innate.

And I would say that it's really just attempting to integrate or really trying to start to believe that real leadership is skill and feedback and iteration. It just takes deliberate practice to be better at it.

I always think about people going from playing a sport to coaching or people going from being in therapy to doing therapy, or people going from being an employee to being in a position of leadership.

When you see somebody in some form of leadership, whether it's a coach or a therapist or somebody in leadership at a business, it always looks easy on the outside. Like I think the people who do it really well, they just make it look easy. It's like, man, I wanna strive to be like that person.

What I don't think gets discussed is that the process that person had to go through to get to that point. It's not like you're in a position of leadership and you just feel like a leader all of a sudden.

Instead, it's like, I might be starting at the ground level and I can continue to climb this stairwell to get to these. You know, future levels, I can be better at this thing. And I love the concept of deliberate practice. I think that if there is anything you can do with regard to being better at something, it's to intentionally and deliberately think about the thing that you are doing.

Like reflect on the way that you are leading, which might mean. Recording yourself in a meeting with somebody and watching it back. It might mean talking through your thought process for how to handle an issue with somebody that you really respect as a leader to figure out how they think about it. What are the gaps in the way that you think about it compared to how they think about it.

It might mean saying, how do you stay grounded when you're about to have a hard conversation with somebody? How do you stay emotionally regulated when somebody else loses their shit around you and it comes outta nowhere? Like what are the things that you do to help in that situation? And to humanize it all, I think you could even ask, what about when you did this poorly?

What was it like to be in the very beginning levels or the very beginning stages of your leadership evolution? What did you wish you knew at that point that you now know? What would help me at this point as I'm seeking to evolve and grow as a leader?

So I think in this case, you can use the people around you who you do think are good leaders and engage in deliberate type feedback and deliberate processes and deliberate practice. And. Know that they also probably fucking sucked at leadership when they started. I think there's something where we see somebody at the level that they are and they've just always been there, like they've always been this incredible leader or person or whoever.

The reality is that they haven't been, most everybody, probably actually everybody, but let's just say the vast, vast majority of people are gonna start at something and they're gonna suck at it. How can you be good at something you've never done before?

And if your answer is, well, some people are just naturals. No, no, no, no. That was myth number one. Remember? No, they're not just naturals. If they seem like they're really good at it, they've probably had leadership like development in different areas of their life. And so there are transferable skills now to this current station that they're in, but they still had to develop the skills that they do have to be where they are now.

So they did suck in some way. It's okay. I think everybody should suck when they start something. One, it keeps us humble. Two, that means we all can continue to grow and evolve and get good at things.

So here's an example of why leadership is learned and not innate. Think about a time. Maybe it's an example for you. So let's just bring this to life for yourself. Think about a time, maybe a recent time where you've had to have a hard conversation with somebody.

And let's just assume you did it. It was unpleasant, but you got it done. You said what you needed to say. You stayed relatively grounded, and you were able to clarify, this is what I need to see. This is the outcome I expect. What questions do you have? Now we're moving on with our day like as much as possible, let's assume it was like a relatively solid conversation with this person.

Okay, now just rewind your life all the way back to the very first time you had to have a conversation like that. I will tell you that I sucked. I fucking sucked at those conversations. Know in The Office episode, like one of the very first episodes, a Halloween episode for season one, where he goes to fire Creed and then he's told to fire Devin and then he goes to fire Devin and Devin's basically like, screw you.

And Michael has no idea what to do or what he is doing or how to have the conversation. Yeah, I mean, just imagine that like sort of like going to have a conversation with somebody to discipline them and I end up giving them a raise, like, that's the sort of level that I sucked at doing this.

And my point in even bringing this up is that having those types of conversation and debriefing when you're done and reflecting on, oh my God, that went horribly. Why was that so hard? What did I do? Consulting with friends who are further along or colleagues or peers or who the, however, to help you figure out what you can do differently next time.

And then doing it differently the next time you do it, and then doing the exact same thing, debriefing, processing, consulting, then doing it again, rinse, wash, and repeat. At this point, my hard conversations do not look like what they used to basically at all, and they're still hard to do.

But my level of ability to stay grounded and be communicative and take accountability is much better than what it was back then. Plus, my ability to separate my own sort of internal stuff is much cleaner at this point. There's a much cleaner divide between my stuff, my own history, and the conversation I'm having with this person right in front of me.

None of this is instinctual. It's learned, and I think that having experiences where you have done it poorly and then cross-referencing those with hopefully recent experiences that have maybe been hard but have gone much smoother is indication that this is a learning process and not a station in life.

We're gonna keep going now. So agenda item number three. Such a smooth transition between agenda items, right?

The third agenda item is how to grow into leadership that actually fits you. This is the piece that I love because if we go back to that original myth, which is that, you know, charismatic, gregarious, extroverted, blah, blah, blah, confident people, you know that they are natural leaders, natural, they're just naturals baby.

But what. I'm saying is that you don't have to be what you're not in order to be a good leader, I would actually argue and say, you should be more of who you are and hold some things true in that process.

So if we're holding true that emotional regulation, communication, and accountability are requirements for good leadership that has nothing to do with gregariousness or charisma. That has nothing to do with grabbing the bull by the horns.

You can be introverted, you can be blunt, you can be gentle, you can be who you are, whatever traits you tend to have. If you can draw out what are things that I consider strengths that live inside of me and what are my blind spots, at least the ones that I know about. And then also maybe from your leadership team or like a trusted colleague, you might say, where are the areas that I really need to grow that I don't yet know about? So you can get for real blind spots. That can be really helpful.

My point is your level of self-awareness is more important than whatever importance you ascribe to personality type with regard to being a good leader.

I also think there's something to be said for, again, like core pieces that should be in place when you are in a position of leadership, and I think that from person to person, our leadership philosophies will differ.

So from my perspective, the goal is not that you seek to be somebody else as a leader, that you try really, really hard to imitate somebody that you think is an exceptional leader or that you try to say things in the exact way that this other person might, or that you channel your old boss for a disciplinary process to do it the exact way that they would.

That's just empty. To me, that's just literally imitating what somebody else would do in that situation, but that doesn't necessarily make it reflective of you and your own strengths as a leader.

I really fucking suck at holding boundaries with policies and processes primarily because I forget what they are. And then secondarily, because I would rather spend my time being creative and coming up with concepts. And so it's just not natural to live there.

So I had to, I don't wanna say learn the hard way, kind of. I feel like my whole life is learning the hard way, but I had to learn that my Integrator and my DCO, honestly, they are both way more policy oriented and tuned in to the structures.

So I'm saying this because that for me is that self-aware, reflective process. I'm not seeking to imitate every fantastic leader who is very by the book and disciplined. I cannot ever be as good at that thing as somebody who is way more oriented to that thing and can seek to strengthen it more.

I'm not saying that you should absolve yourself of anything that's mildly difficult for you. I am saying that you should be self-aware, you should be reflective, you should be communicative, emotionally regulated, and accountable, and you should play to your strengths and own your blind spots and some things you can get rid of and some things you're not going to be able to.

I might be intimately involved in talking through policies and like a concept for policy and whether or not we need it and where it could live and how it might come to life, and who will take ownership. And I might even relay this to the entire team and say, look, we have to do this thing. It's really hard to say yes to this policy that's going to feel restrictive. Here's the rationale behind it. Here's why we're doing it. I'm happy to have any conversation with you about this, like whatever questions you have, let's set up time and discuss.

But when it comes to enforcing that policy, my hands are clean. Not because I need them to be clean, but because that's when it might get passed over to my Integrator or my DCO.

That to me is an example of each of us playing to our strengths in positions of leadership and attempting to own our blind spots still trying to be regulated, communicative, and accountable.

So I think my very last point in this entire episode is, as much as leadership is not a natural way of being in the world. It's also not about becoming perfect.

I just had a conversation with my DCO about this, where she was kind of beating herself up a little bit, like expecting too much out of herself and thinking that she should have all of the answers for these very nuanced and complex situations with regard to, you know, mandated reporting and guardianship with minors. These very like nuanced situations.

And my feedback to her and my feedback for myself consistently is, you don't need to know everything. I don't need to know everything. What I need to know is that i'll be honest about what I know. I'll be thoughtful about a situation or about a problem. I'll be intentional about moving forward with regard to a solution. I'll communicate that effectively to the people who are involved. And I'll process whatever shit that comes up for me. If anything, there might be nothing.

I don't need to do everything perfectly. It's not realistic to expect that of yourself. It is realistic for me to assess how I do and question how could I do that better? It's really more about becoming consistent and owning your style of leadership with nuance and in context.

And then if nothing, I hope you leave with this. If leadership is not inborn and it's built, then that means we all can be better leaders. That means we all can evolve as leaders for our teams, for our practices, and quite frankly, for ourselves.

We get to become the leaders that we always needed and wanted in our lives. That is incredible.

On that note, we are wrapping things up. As per usual, thank you for being here with me. I really value time and so I really appreciate you spending your precious time with me and engaging in the real work of growing and evolving yourself and not just your systems.

If you are really ready to strengthen structure that supports your growth as a leader, that supports your team and your culture and your systems, then check out the EOS Mastermind.

I'm about to launch the second biannual, EOS Mastermind of the Year. So if you are interested and you're listening to this right as it releases, get the hell on over to www.taravossenkemper.com/eos-mastermind. Get on the first dibs access list and you will get emails as soon as things open up, I am freaking pumped about this next Mastermind. It is going to be incredible.

And that's all I got. I'll see you next time. Thanks so much. Bye.