Ep 32 likeable badass rerecord
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[00:00:00] Today I wanna talk to you about Likable Badass Leadership, and it is based on a book by Allison Fragale i'm sorry if I'm saying it wrong, but she's so amazing that I really hope that she's cool about it. And her name is spelled F-R-A-G-A-L-E. First name Allison.
And her book is Likable, badass, and it's incredible. I also wanna thank the very many people who actually recommended that I read it from so many different areas of my life that I can't even believe. It took me as long as it did to look at it, but it was worth every second, and it really helped me refine my thinking around my leadership style.
I think many of us know that there's a lot of skill in the physician world in terms of leadership. We lead teams. We lead in the operating room, we lead in clinic, we lead in the boardroom, we lead on committees. I mean it, the list goes on and on. What unfortunately happens less is that we're taught to lead with connection.
We're almost always taught to lead with competence, and there's [00:01:00] nothing wrong with competence. We need it. We are good at it, but almost none of us are taught on how to do both of them together. And so that combination is really what's highlighted in this book that I thought was so useful. And this conversation really is about how we have to be both assertive and warm in order to be effective.
And this version of leadership, people think that they can trust you, they will follow you, and they will remember how much they enjoyed working with you. I also love that Allison talks about how this is a muscle that you can develop. If you don't have it right now, you can get there. So I can tell you that for me and for most of my career, I worked in situations where I walked in with guns blazing, and I don't really mean guns, okay?
I just mean I came in hot and ready and I may have skipped all the pleasantries. I may have not used people's first names. I was just ready to jump into the work. I was excited as enthusiastic, but I wasn't always connecting. Now. I gave it into mean [00:02:00] assertiveness, like that's how I sought it, thought, saw myself.
I was really thinking I was being direct, I was being efficient, making sure that things landed and everybody knew that I had a plan and that I'd worked on it, and that I'd researched it. I mean, it was the most academic way you could think about it, but I also came in with a lot of full confidence, and this could absolutely be seen as assertiveness as we put it in the context of the book.
That's not necessarily how I thought of myself. I just thought I was direct and from the east coast, I was born in New Jersey and I did come in trying to get my point across and I oftentimes skipped the human part. So I can tell you, I did it this week. My wife was on the phone with me and one of our children, and I jumped right in.
Did you get this done? Did you check on this? Have you done that? It was like my checklist of everything in my brain that I wanted to make sure I didn't forget, and she was like, Hey. How was your week? Do you need anything? And I'm like, oh yeah, right. I have to stop coming in. Guns blazing. And quite honestly, her approach way better than mine, got way more information, got back to those questions I was worried about.[00:03:00]
And so as much as I'm doing this at work and I'm telling you about it, I am still working on it, but I don't always show the team that I care. And so this is such an absolutely fantastic way to express what I feel, but I don't necessarily get out there as well. Sometimes I just walked in these situations and I looked at the problems and I thought about what we were gonna do, and it made people think I did not recognize their experience, that I did not honor their experience, and I didn't appreciate their perspective, and I didn't really have the people we were serving in mind either.
The intention was there, but the connection was not. And so what really stood out for me in this book was that you have to give permission to yourself to be yourself. She gave a ton of different examples that would work for different people who either needed to be seen as more warm, or more assertive, which was great.
And so I'm somebody who's direct and walks in and has the problem in mind, but I wanna make sure that the people in the room feel respected and that I learn from them, that they recognize that I [00:04:00] see their value and that I want to learn from them. And I do recognize I don't know all the answers to many of the things I encounter.
I don't know the best way for us to proceed. And so there is this fantastic opportunity to get this collective response, and it's oftentimes better than any one of our ideas. So I love the fact that in this book, you don't have to fake warmness. You don't have to force assertiveness, but you can use a number of different strategies that she talks about in order to match your styles.
You can find you're both warm and confident zone. Great leaders oftentimes and should be operating in. So some of the actionable tips that she talked about were that before a difficult conversation, take two seconds, pause and ground yourself so you don't come and hunt, but you have a moment and it might need to be more than two seconds.
It's whatever works for you. It might be 10 seconds, but then open with a sentence that acknowledges the problem and acknowledges the person. So start with the person and see what they're saying. Tell me what you're seeing, or tell me what [00:05:00] the problem is, or tell me how we should work on the solution together.
So they understand that you are listening and you're hearing. And then ask yourself, what am I trying to accomplish and how do I get them to the same point that I'm at? Or how do I want them to feel at the end of this conversation? So if it's important. We get to the solution. The team also feels that working together to get to that solution is just as important and that you recognize and value their input.
Now, the other thing is to take a couple of minutes to understand your default pattern. Do you know that you're always coming off as warm and you actually need to work more on being seen as competent or assertive, or do you need to work on the warmth muscle like I do? You know you're coming in competent, but maybe not with the connection that you want.
So whichever those you feel like you lead with, most commonly the goal is to build the opposite muscle intentionally. So I had a great conversation this week with a couple other female leaders, and one of them knows that she shows up warm. [00:06:00] She needed to work on assertiveness, and so I was talking about how I show up as assertive.
I need to work on being seen as warm. Not that either of us isn't both assertive and warm, but it's the way that you're seen and you put yourself out there. And I know that the reason this works is that the warmth and the competence are not seen equally. And we look at leaders. So we walk in ready to show my confidence.
That's great. But it turns out what psychologists have found is that people judge warmth first, and if they perceive that warmth, that psychological safety results, and they can feel like they can relax. They feel like they can communicate openly. They can talk if they're uncertain, which is really critical in these situations.
And if you do anything else, if you walk in with guns blazing, you do not get that connection. And people do not share in the way in which they could be contributing. So people don't interpret that you are warm and they're suspicious. They don't feel the safety. And so while competence [00:07:00] definitely matters.
Warmth needs to come first, and competence without the warmth is thought to be abrasive or intimidating and really not as useful. People don't listen. People do not wanna follow, and people do not feel connected to you or the problem or the solution. So the likable style that brought it together in this book really blends both so that your team can both trust your judgment and feel safe speaking up.
And so some additional tips that she added is to add a sentence of purpose before you come in with some direction. So I wanna be sure we're aligned for patient safety. Might be an example. So the other thing is to watch your opening tone. Start warmly buys a lot of goodwill for a direct message, and use intentional body language.
Make eye contact. Be open in your posture. Don't have your arms crossed or things tied across your body. Have your arms open. Maybe put them out on the table. Don't cross them though. Make it clear that you are here. And nod, lean in. Don't be leaning backwards. And do try and replace your assumptions with questions.
[00:08:00] Hey, what made this challenging today?
The other thing is that in practice, likable badass is lead with clarity and care. They avoid being harsh. If you have criticism, do it in private and make sure you frame it in a way so it's towards the ideal as opposed to what we didn't do. But don't do this in public. This will ruin all the warmth. And as much as you may think these may be lessons for others, pointing out an individual is never gonna work.
So in an ideal situation, what we wanna do and what really helps people move in a direction that you feel like you want them to move in. Is to show warmth and show it in ways that they can fit in. So start with curiosity. Hey, walk me through what you're thinking, and then also use relational framing.
Here's why it matters for the team or our patients or our family, or whatever you're talking to people about. And then give feedback with partnership. Say something like, I'm sharing this because I want you to succeed and I know that you can't. [00:09:00] And then show warmth in a way that feels natural to you. And this part was really valuable to me.
I didn't wanna do something that felt insincere to me or somebody else. So whether that's gratitude or perspective taking, or validation, or just emphasizing shared goals, these can all show people the warmth that you already feel, but maybe not putting out there at the beginning. Now, in academic medicine, this may not feel quite as comfortable as in some other leadership talks you may have heard.
So I recommend. Over indexing incompetence, and this is the problem that I trap I fall into, and I hope you can do better, but we have a lot of things to do during a day, and so decisions can be high stakes and communication breakdowns happen all the time. I'm sure everybody could point to one that they have this week.
We all see them and we all know about the misunderstandings that happen from them. So warmth is not a soft skill. It's protective. It helps people feel safe, and it allows them to speak up. It also helps them tell me when I'm making a mistake. It encourages early escalation, which we know [00:10:00] is so important, and for any of you who've talked about timeouts, whether that's on the floor or the clinic or in the operating room, it's important and it improves retention.
People do not leave jobs, they leave managers. So be the manager that they want to work with. Combine your warmth with your confidence so that they are around the person that they want to work with. And if you're starting rounds or meetings or difficult conversations, start with that one sentence of human connection.
When you're setting expectations, link the task directly to the mission, whether that's safety or workflow or patient care. And when you need information, ask open-ended questions instead of yes and no ones. And when that tension rises, slow your pace. Take a breath and acknowledge it. But speed often reads as impatience.
And so the final thought is that this style isn't about correcting your personality. It's about upgrading your mindset. Start seeing leadership as an interaction that you shape, not a role that you perform, [00:11:00] connections that you make with other people, and the warmth and competence are skills that you can strengthen with intention, build the muscle and work on the one that's not your easiest or your best.
The more you practice it, the more grounded you are and the more intention you show. You're going to build better teams, better departments and a better career. So think about who you want to be as a leader a year from now, and then build the habits you need today.
The future version of you is created by the mindset you choose every day. So this is a great place to start, and if you need help working on this stuff, please let me know. I'd love to talk to you, or you can read the blog or listen to the podcast or join the newsletter, but these are the things that we talk about all the time in medical mentor coaching.
And if you're listening, please pass this along to somebody else who might benefit. Please rate and review the show, and five star ratings really help us get this out to the people that we would love to serve. Thank you for joining me for this episode.
I look forward to talking to you next week.
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