Tales Of Leadership: Authenticity In The Workplace

What's up, Cadre? Happy Thursday. Luke Wendtlandt here. Hope everybody had an amazing day. Tales of leadership today, baby. I'm going to give you one piece of advice, guidance or feedback for feedback that you may find beneficial when it comes to working with somebody, working with a team and or leading teams and or reporting up to somebody. So again, my name is Luke Wendtlandt. One of the things that I absolutely love to do is coach individuals through difficult times. When we're talking about leadership, which is really exciting and it should be an exciting time, you know, I would say, like, leaders lead, but actually, you know what?

Leaders really do provide psychological safety. Leaders provide psychological safety from the times. What's up, Chris? Gosh, it's always good to see you, brother. We got to go get coffee soon. What's up, do, man? So I want you to think about this, right? So if, if you report to somebody, what are basically, like, the three things that you would want? What are the three things that you would want? Number one, you'd want to be able to be you, right? You'd want to be able to be you. What do I mean by that?

Is you can, you know, you can be yourself. You can be your personality. Number two, you'd want to be able to also be you when it's tough, when times are hard, asking for help, getting support, all those other things. And then the last thing that you'd really want to know, truly, is, where do you stand? Right? Where do you stand? And I think what ends up happening is we provide as leaders one and two, but we miss a lot on number three. Okay, I'll give you an example. How many individuals here have worked for somebody before?

And it gets to December, and you have your review, right? You have your review, and you come up to December time, you have your review, and all of a sudden you get review, and it's like, this is a problem. This is an issue. This is a problem. And we went 364 days without noticing this. Or we've been told that things are going really well. Raise your hand if that's been you. Me. Right. So you go, go, go all year, and then you get to that review time, and then you're in your annual review, and you get to your review and it's, well, you know, we're missing this.

This is a problem. You know, we really want to see a grow here. We want to do this. We want to do this and we want to do this. So this other 364 days, we are missing out on consistent feedback, consistent growth, forget about stretching ourselves and pushing ourselves. But so I ask you, what ends up happening then is, in my humble opinion, leadership or that leader, the direct report, reportee, whatever you want to say. Ultimately it becomes disingenuous and it becomes disingenuous when it comes to feedback, praise, performance.

And because you just had that review where it's like you just told me all year, I was doing well, and then we got to a point of having this and this, having this annual review and we missed. So when we talk authenticity, I really want you to think about this. Psychological safety, support all the things, yes, but feedback, that feedback loop should be open. It should be open 24/7 for you to be able to access your superior, or from a superior down to direct report that you have these feedbacks. What's something you can implement at your organization in order to have this consistent feedback loop is let's start feedback Friday.

Let's get feedback Friday. Rolling through feedback Friday, we can build psychological safety. We can develop keys of authenticity or otherwise. We can deliver support. But most importantly, that disingenuous nature of leadership, which ultimately fragments relationships between individuals at your organization, can become more collaborative, can become more cooperative, can drive compassion, empathy, respect. You actually know where somebody is in the relationship with them. You know about maybe some things that are happening at their personal life or otherwise.

If you do not know, if you're the individual that reports to you is married, has a partner, any of those things, go back to the drawing board. If you're a leader, if you want to be a transformational leader, think of ground level, right? Authenticity. Think of ground level as actually knowing your direct reports, right? And then as you continue to move up the ranks in your leadership skillset, knowledge or otherwise, then it's like, hmm, I wonder how this feedback is going to directly affect them today.

Will it motivate them? Will it disengage all those things? So today in authenticity, we've all had these moments, but I wanted to drive authenticity specifically to feedback. And you can really, truly become disingenuous when you do not provide consistent feedback to your teams. I've been guilty of it, and I've also been guilty on the other side of it, too. So with that being said, I just hope it's something that opens up your eyes when you're working with either, like I said, either individuals that are reporting to you or individuals that ultimately are connecting with their boss or supervisor.

Otherwise. So let's lean in to authenticity when it comes down to leading and leading our teams in the show, you are the best at knowing your team personal knowledge. Oh, that's so nice. I love that comment. Thank you so much. It's something that's really important to me, you know, is diving in and truly understanding your team, knowing your team where they're at, leaning into where they are, that authenticity matters, and it matters so much. And once you break that, you know, once you break that threshold of almost like a transactional moment between employee and subordinate to a transformational moment where you're in there, so.

And, Gene, I love you so much. You have no idea how much you meant to me over the years. Gosh, I just. I think the absolute world of you, it's hard not to get a little emotional seeing you. I hope you're enjoying retirement. You are one of the most amazing human beings that I've ever had the opportunity to work with. The world is better for you. You are amazing. Don't you ever forget that. I love you. I hope everybody has the opportunity to take this one in and really, really, really think about it and think about what it means for them and their direct reports and people they're working with, because my gut is, you've had those moments that I talked about earlier in the live where you've missed and you've missed with people, and it now can turn disingenuous rather than authentic.

So retirement is so awesome. Thank you. I love it. All right, you guys take care. Peace to everybody. Happy holidays to you, your families take it in and have the best few days.