What I Wish I'd Known About Leading Women

Okay. I want to tell you a story today, and it's not a flattering one, but I think you need to hear it. A few years ago, I was sitting across from a very amazingly talented woman on my team. I had something hard to say to her. I knew it was going to be hard. I rehearsed it on the way to work that morning. I had the words, I had the plan. And. And somewhere between sitting down at that table and opening my mouth, I made this quiet little decision that I didn't even realize I was making. I decided I'd rather she like me than I'd rather she grow. So I softened it. I patted it. I qualified the whole thing so much that by the time we stood up, she had no idea that anything was wrong. Then wrapped up my business day, walked to my car feeling so relieved. At the end of the day, I told myself I handled it well. I told myself that I was kind. But then six weeks later, I kid you not, six weeks later, I was sitting at the exact same table having the exact same conversation. Except now it was worse. Now the pattern had been going on longer now. The other people on my team had clocked it, and now I was the one who'd let it get there because I'd chosen my own comfort over her clarity and growth. That was the day I started learning something that nobody had ever taught me. Leading women is its own thing, and being liked is not the same as leading them. Well, Well. Hey, friends. Welcome back to leadership Clearly. I'm Julie Wagner, and today I want to talk to you like we're sitting on my couch with a coffee or an Alani new in hand. Because honestly, this is just one of those topics that took me way too long to figure out, and I want to save you some of the years that it cost me. We are talking today about leading women. What I wish I'd known, what I'm still learning, and that one shift that when it finally lands, it changes everything. If you're leading other women right now in any capacity, whether it's a team of two or maybe a team of 20, whether you're running a company or a small group or a department ministry marketplace, this episode is for you. So settle in, grab your coffee, grab your journal, or your note taking device. I am actually not drinking an Alani New today. If you've heard any of my past podcasts, I do love me some Alani New. I am drinking good old water. So today we're gonna get honest with each other, and it might be a little bit raw. It might feel a little stingy in some areas, but you know what? If you're not growing, you're dying. So let's go ahead and dive in. Let me name something first, because I think a lot of us have been living inside this without ever having a word for it. Most of us came into leadership, having spent our whole lives learning how to be likable. I'm talking decades of it. We've been rewarded for being agreeable. We've been rewarded for reading the room, for softening our edges so everyone else around us can feel comfortable. And then one day somebody hands us a title, and we're just supposed to flip a switch that nobody ever taught us how to flip. I call this the likability tax. The cost of leading in a way that prioritizes how you're perceived over what your team actually needs. And listen, okay, I didn't recognize it in myself for years, so let me just tell you what it actually looks like, because once you see it, you cannot unsee. Looks like softening feedback so much that the woman opposite of you cannot even tell that you gave her feedback. It looks like saying, I'm not sure. What do you think? When you actually know what you think, you just don't want to be the one who said it. It looks like delaying conversations because the timing was just never quite right. It looks like making decisions by committee that were actually yours to make. It looks like the panic that hits your chest when you can tell someone's disappointed in you. And the cost of all of that, it's real. Your team loses clarity. You lose authority. Not in some dramatic way, but slowly, like in a hundred tiny moments where you didn't quite say the right thing or you didn't even say the thing at all. The work begins to suffer, and eventually resentment is going to show up on both sides. You start resenting them for not figuring it out, and they start resenting you for never being clear about what you actually wanted. Here's the part that nobody warned me about, so I want to share it with you. The harder you try to be liked, the less you actually are. Because what people respect isn't your approachability, it's your clarity and your leadership. Clarity sometimes costs you the moment, so it can give you the relationship. The version of you who says the hard thing today, that's the version of you that the woman across the table will still trust in a year from now. The version who doesn't say the things that need to be said loses trust. Slowly, one unclear conversation at a time, until one day you'll wonder why the amazing employee across the table from you stopped bringing things to you. And the answer is because she stopped believing you'd actually tell her the truth. Okay, so that's the surface. Now let's start to go a little deeper. Let's. Let's peel back the layers of the onion. Because underneath the likability tax, there are dynamics that show up specifically when women lead women, and nobody talks about that out loud. I'm going to name three of them, and I want to say something first. Naming these isn't the same as fixing them. The whole point of this segment is for you to feel less alone. Because if you've been sitting with any of this privately just wondering if there's something wrong with you friend, there is not. The dynamic is real. You're not making it up. Dynamic 1, the peer to boss transition. So we're going to use the name Jane today. Okay, this is. This is one of the hardest transitions in my personal opinion. And I've been there. I've done it. I've got three or four different T shirts about this. This is what happens when almost every woman gets promoted. You used to vent to Jane at lunch, right? You used to text her about your weekend. You were in the same boat. You were on the same sales floor. You were on the same marketing team. You were friends at church. And all of a sudden you now have to give her feedback. You have to tell her that she didn't get the role she wanted, or you have to hold her accountable for something. And the relationship has to grow up fast in a way that nobody actually prepared either of you for. I. I truly believe there's a grief in that. Like a real grief. The friendship you had isn't exactly the friendship you have now. And that's not because anybody did anything wrong. It's because the roles have changed. And the temptation, which is a huge temptation, is to pretend the relationship hasn't changed when guess what? It has. I have watched so many women, me included, try to lead a former peer while still acting like a peer. It doesn't work out, guys. It confuses her, it confuses you. And honestly, it confuses everyone watching, too. Dynamic two, the friendship that looks like leadership, but it isn't. So this one's a little sneakier. This is the woman on your team who confides in you. She brings you into her personal life. She asks you advice on her marriage or for her kids or her faith. And it feels close, it feels meaningful. And I'll be honest it's probably meaningful to a certain point, but then one day you have to give her hard feedback at work, and suddenly you've lost both. You've lost the friendship and you've lost the authority because she cannot separate them. And honestly, neither can you anymore. I'm not saying don't be human with the women on your team. I'm saying notice when a human starts to slide into something that's going to make it harder for you to lead her. Well, there's a line, and I promise you, it's worth being thoughtful about where you put it. Dynamic 3. The unspoken comparison. I almost didn't include this one because I think it's the least one that I would like to actually admit out loud. But you know what? Let's keep it real. And here we go. There's a comparison that happens between women on a team that almost never happens between men. The way women on your team measure themselves against you and the way you can feel it without anyone ever saying a word. The way praise can sometimes land sideways. The way competition goes unnamed, but everyone knows it's there. And I'm not saying this is right. What I am saying, though, is that this is real and it's not for everyone. Right? There are plenty of leaders out there that this is not a thing. But the first step to leading through this is being willing to notice it in yourself before you notice it in anyone else. None of this means that there's anything wrong with you, okay? Or with the women you're leading. It just means the dynamic is real. We're all carrying conditions that we didn't choose. And the first step to leading through any of this is being willing to name it. At least to ourselves. Okay, friends, now, we've named the tax. We've named the dynamics. And now I want to talk to you about the shift, because there is a shift. And when it finally happened for me, oh, it changed everything about the way I lead. Here it is. You stop trying to be loved by them and start trying to love them. Them. I'm going to say this again because it almost sounds the same, but it's not the same at all. Okay? You stop trying to be loved by them and start trying to love them. Being loved by them is about you. It's about how they perceive you, how they talk about you when you're not in the room, how warm the relationship feels dayto day. It's a loop that's pointed inward towards you. The currency is their affection, and you're constantly checking the balance. Loving them is about them. It's about whether they're growing, whether they're seen, whether they're being told the truth in a way they can actually see it and use it, whether they're becoming who they have the capacity to become. The loop is pointed outward. The currency is there, flourishing. And you don't measure it in a single conversation. You measure it in years. Here's the truth I had to learn the hard way. If I'm leading for love, I'll give the woman across from me exactly what she needs, even when it costs me her warmth for a few weeks. If I'm leading for likability, I'll give her what keeps me comfortable, and she'll pay the price for it. That is not a small distinction. That is the whole game. And I have to take you somewhere for a minute because I cannot talk about this without going here. The reason this shift matters so much, the reason it's worth fighting for, is that we're not just managing performance. We are stewarding people. People made in the image of God. People that he knit together on purpose with gifts and callings and capacity that he put them in long before they ever showed up on your team. When I read Psalm 139, which is one of my favorite psalms, by the way, when I read it, I read that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. I can't just keep that for myself. I have to extend that to the women I lead. They weren't given to me so I could keep them comfortable. They were given to me so I could help them become who they are supposed to become. God doesn't call us to be liked. He calls us to be faithful. He calls us to steward the people he put right in front of us. And stewardship sometimes looks like saying the hard thing, holding the high standard, refusing to soften the truth into something so vague she can't even act on it. The women you lead aren't your audience. Save that for social media. They're your assignment. And, my friends, there is a holy difference between the two. So now it's time to get practical for a minute, because I don't want this to all be theology and no traction. Here are four things I do differently now than I used to. None of them are dramatic, but all of them are hard. 1. I had the conversation the first time. It crosses my mind. Not the third. The delay is where the resentment grows. The first nudge is almost always the right time. By the time I'm thinking about it for the third time, I've already built A whole story in my head. I've already gotten frustrated. I've already vented to my husband, poor guy. He's my venter. Or my daughter, she gets to hear all of it too. But the conversation that I finally have with, let's say Jane, it's going to be heavier than what it ever needed to be. And that's my fault. That's on me the first time I notice it. Now that's when I bring it up. Even if it's small, especially, oh my gosh, especially if it's small. Small conversations early on are the whole reason you don't have to have big conversations later. So I am gonna pause before I go into step two and, and three and four. But we have a rule in my house that I have implemented since my kids were very, very little. You have 24 hours. If someone offends you or there is something that needs a correction and I'm not talking tattling on each other kind of stuff because, you know, kids will be kids. But now, now my children are grown. But one of the biggest things is you have 24 hours to come and, and bring the offense to the person. But before you bring that offense, you need to make sure that you've, number one, talked to God about it. Number two, you have worked out the words you're going to say and not just finger point and say, well, I don't like the way you did this. Okay? But the goal is to get the issue rectified within 24 hours. And I will be very frank with you. There's a reason why my two kids who are almost four years apart are best friends. There is. My son is an adult man who is almost 20 and my daughter is turning 16. That's not a normal dynamic that you hear in relationships, right? So what I did was I took that 24 hours rule, the 24 hour rule. I implemented it into my business, into my leadership, in my 9 to 5 job, into my leadership with the ministry that I lead. And if I have never talked about this before, I do lead a ministry. I get to lead a worship, I'm a worship pastor and I get to lead a celebrate recovery ministry at our church on Friday nights. And I have to tell you, I have a great team. And if something happens, I'm going to go and make sure that I absolutely sit down and have a conversation with them, either in person or on the phone. Never going to text it. Don't ever text it. Please don't ever text it. We're going to have a conversation And I'm going to make sure. I'm very mindful with the way I'm speaking about it, but it's going to happen within 24 hours. And I. I truly believe that God is absolutely intertwined into those conversations. And because I'm choosing to move faster and not dwell on it, that God is absolutely blessing the conversation. And that's why we're able to resolve things quickly. Right? There's a reason why my teams are strong. My 9 to 5 team is strong. We have struggles, but it's strong. My ministry that I get to lead is strong. And then hopefully one day I'm going to get to hire some employees to help me out with this podcast and my coaching, and then I can guarantee you that's going to be strong, too. So just wanted to bring that up because I think that's something that y' all need to hear. So here's the second I separate the relationship from the role. We can be warm, we can be close, we can laugh at lunch and check in on each other's families and genuinely care about each other's lives. And when I'm giving feedback, I'm in my role, not in our friendship. Both can be true at the same time. I don't have to pick, but I do have to be clear with myself first about which one I am right now. One of the ways I signal it, in all honesty, is just by saying this out loud. I'm going to put my leader hat on for a second. I tell you, that tiny sentence does so much, much work. It really lays down the foundation and sets the precedence of what the conversation is going to look like. And basically it's telling her this is a different conversation and it's telling me it's time to show up differently for it. Jules. Time to show up differently. So the third, I stopped apologizing for having standards. I used to say this a lot. Okay, I know this is a lot to ask before asking for. I mean, kind of a basic thing, right? I mean, basic, basic stuff that is part of somebody's job or a volunteer role. I used to say, I'm so sorry to bother you before sending a message that was literally a part of her job. I don't do that anymore. The standard is the standard. I can be warm about it without being apologetic about it. There's a version of warmth that's generous and there's a version of warmth that's self protective. I had to sit back and learn that difference. And you know, I did. I learned it. Okay, this is the fourth one, and this is the hardest one, because I am a little bit of a people pleaser. I would like to say I'm a recovering people pleaser because before this would have killed me. And now that I'm in my mid-40s and also going through perimenopause, because for those ladies that are in that mid stage of life, I gotta tell you, all of our forks have been given. At some point, I learned to let people be disappointed in me. This one took me, I want to say, probably a decade and a half, 15 years, okay? Letting a woman I lead be upset with me and not chasing her down to fix it, not over explaining it. Not sending the Follow up text 12 hours later to smooth it over, that was huge. Trusting that the relationship is bigger than this one moment. Trusting that my job is to lead her and not manage how she feels about my leadership, that was the kicker. And I want to be careful here, okay? I'm not talking about being callous. I'm not talking about not caring. I care so much about the women I lead. I'm talking about not letting their momentary disappointment be the thing that runs my decisions. Because the second I let that in, I'm not leaving anymore. I'm performing. And that fourth one, like I said, it took me almost two decades, okay? But when it finally clicked, that's what's changed. That's when everything changed. Okay, friends, if you're leading other women right now, I want you to hear me say something. The pressure you feel is real. The dynamics are real. The conditioning you're working against is. Is real. And the version of you that's trying to be everyone's favorite, that's not the version of you the women on your team actually need. They don't need you to be liked. They need you to be clear. They need you to be willing to disappoint them in service of who they're becoming. They need you to lead from love, not from longing for their approval. They need you to be the kind of woman they can become because they watched you go first. That's hard. But it's also holy work. And it's the kind of leadership the women coming up behind you are so quietly desperate to see. And they need it. So this week, I want you to ask yourself just one question. Where am I? Trading clarity for likability. That's it. Just sit with it. Don't rush past it. Pick one place, just one, and go do something about it. Ask yourself those four questions. Have the conversation, hold the standard, say the sentence. You've been softening for weeks. Trust that the relationship is bigger than this one moment. Clarity is an act of love, and that's what I got for you this week. So I will see you next Monday. And until then, leave with clarity and leave with love. If today's episode resonated with you and you're realizing that leadership requires more clarity, more courage, and more consistency than you've been operating with, I want to invite you into something deeper. The Clarity Code is my new leadership bootcamp, designed to help you slow down, get clear, and lead with confidence when conversations are hard, decisions are heavy, and people are counting on you. This isn't about fixing everyone else, it's about strengthening how you lead so your words, your presence, and your friends follow through. Actually build trust. If you're ready to step into leadership with greater clarity and conviction, I'd love for you to join us inside. The Clarity Code link is found in the show notes and if leadership clearly has been encouraging or grounding for you, make sure you're subscribed to the podcast so you don't miss an episode. We release new episodes every Monday to help you start your week off with clarity, encouragement, and strong leadership perspective. And finally, if you know a leader who's navigating hard conversations or just caring a lot right now, please share this episode with them. Leadership was never meant to be done alone. I'm glad you're here. Keep leading. Well, I'll see you next week.