3 Actionable Steps to Shut Down Your Leadership Doubt

In my experience as an executive coach, all leaders struggle with some level of feeling ill-equipped for the job. It can be a vague sense of something missing or disconnection. It can be the paralyzing thought that you’re masquerading as competent and it’s only a matter of time before you’re caught. 

Those feelings interfere with your effectiveness as a leader and cause you close yourself off from your team. But when you lead with authenticity, balancing candor, compassion, and courage, a new world of possibility and power unlocks.

There are three simple steps that any leader can follow to guide their team with authenticity. These steps center around opening yourself up emotionally, embracing honesty, and being comfortable with your humanity. Let’s dive into step number one.

This step sounds simple, but it takes energy and commitment to open yourself to vulnerabilities. 

To begin, you must notice when the interference (the things that get in our way) of negative assessments or old stories (the negative assumptions we believe about ourselves) blunts your focus and consider how often that happens to your team.

• Explore new ideas and options with common sense and curiosity.
• Notice when you’re triggered by something and consider your emotions.
• Take care of yourself physically throughout the day, eating and drinking water, breaking when you need to. 

Encourage others to do the same. Your human experience matters and echoes the experience of your team, your colleagues, and your customers. Being aware of your own human experience develops empathy and emotional intelligence, two vital characteristics of great leaders.

The adage “Everyone is fighting a battle you can’t see” is true. As you are human at work, so are your employees. Speaking to them candidly and compassionately, without the interference of jargon, discomfort with difficult messages, or policy mumbo-jumbo, allows them to hear the message clearly and own their response. 

As renowned author and research professor Dr. Brené Brown says, “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” 

Honoring others’ experience and emotions with compassion will allow them to reduce their interference and distraction at work.

Before we move to the third step to implementing an authentic leadership approach, let’s address some common interference—objections, roadblocks, the things that distract us—my executive-coaching clients face when we begin this conversation.

The first objection most have is that there’s no time to be human at work. I get it. I once functioned in back-to-back meetings too. I remember what it’s like to be desperate for a bathroom break for hours, or to eat lunch on the run at three while late for the next meeting. I remember sitting in meetings as a call came through from the daycare and hoping desperately the baby wasn’t so sick that I’d have to figure out how to go get him.

What I don’t remember is what happened in those meetings. I was managing my interference rather than paying attention. And so are you and your employees. When you are leading an organization that functions without allowing time for reflection and rest, time away, or sick days, you invite all that interference in. 

Interference doesn’t go away because you don’t acknowledge it. If you think you don’t have time to be human at work, you don’t understand all the time you and your team are already spending managing your collective humanity.

The second objection I hear is that compassion and candor will really muck up the productivity of the team. You can’t spend time holding everyone’s bleeding heart in your hands. Someone must make the doughnuts after all. 

To that, I tell you I’m not advocating you quit your day job to babysit the emotions of your team. I’m simply saying you are a more effective leader when you are aware of those feelings and their impact. You can respect someone’s emotions and experience while also holding them accountable to standards. You can send a clear performance message compassionately. You can even fire someone with dignity and humanity.

Focusing on growth and progress rather than achievement, the beginner’s mindset is the one that cheers when the baby takes the first step, rather than noticing the fall that immediately follows it. In the coming days and weeks, the beginner’s mindset counts the steps no matter how many times the baby falls.

And babies fall a lot. 

That same mindset applies here. You are a new authentic leader and you’re going to fall often in the beginning. That’s okay. As we learn new things, we make mistakes. The important thing, and the core of becoming an authentic, unstoppable leader, is to learn from those mistakes and commit to being self-aware, transparent, open to new perspectives, and aligned with your values, always.

For more advice on improving your professional performance, find Naked at Work on Amazon.  More coaching is available at Avenue 8 On-Demand, on the topics of Shifting Your Leadership Perspective , Emotional Intelligence , and more.

Danessa Knaupp is an executive coach, CEO, and keynote speaker, shifting the global conversation on leadership. She has coached hundreds of executives across every major industry and has developed a reputation as a candid, compassionate and courageous leadership partner. She is the author of the leadership manual, Naked at Work: A Leader’s Guide to Fearless Authenticity. She regularly addresses C-suite audiences on how to harness the power of real authenticity (not #authenticity) to drive measurable business results. Danessa earned her executive coaching credentials from Georgetown University, is credentialed by the International Coach Federation, and holds a B.A. in Psychology and Sociology from the College of William and Mary. She spent more than 20 years as an entrepreneur and a senior executive, and ultimately, CEO, before founding her coaching practice. Connect with her at danessaknaupp.com.