Humanizing Leadership: How Executive Coaching and Psychodynamics Beat Burnout | Ep. 96 ft. Tanna Brodbar

Speaker A: Helping leaders understand there's a difference between what we call containing emotion and actually denying that we're feeling the emotion. And so when I talk about humanizing leadership, it's really that it's really acknowledging that you're still a person even when you're a leader.

Speaker B: Welcome everyone to the Leadership in Quarters podcast, the interview series where leaders come to share their perspectives on different leadership topics. I'm Josh Selden and today's guest is Tana Broadbar. Tana Broadbar is an experienced senior executive, business owner, lecturer and speaker with more than 25 years of experience across risk management, strategy, marketing and technology in the financial industry and media in the US And Canada. Driven by a desire to humanize leadership, Tana left the corporate world to focus on supporting the emotional and and psychological well being of leaders. Tana now leverages her industry experience as the founder of both Percepta Leadership, which provides specialized psychotherapy services to executives and leaders, and the center for Applied Psychodynamics which provides coach training. Tana is on the Faculty of Graduate Studies at EU Business School in Barcelona, Spain where she teaches leadership, as well as York University in Canada where she teaches risk management and Insurance studies. Tana holds an MBA in Leadership, a Master of Arts in Humanities, and several executive coaching designations. Tana is also a student therapist and clinical supervision in Ontario Psychotherapy and Counseling College and is completing a five year graduate level program to become a registered psychotherapist. So welcome Tana.

Speaker A: Hi. Thank you so much. I'm really delighted to be here.

Speaker B: I'm really glad to have you and I'm excited to jump into the topics. We'll give everybody a heads up. It's about humanizing leadership, which a lot of times we don't do. So I'm really glad we get to talk about this and dive into what exactly that means.

Speaker A: Wonderful. And I'm obviously passionate about this, so I was so excited to have the opportunity to come and speak with you about it.

Speaker B: Perfect. So if you can just give us an idea of what it really means when we say humanizing leadership in the professional world that we see today.

Speaker A: Yeah. So humanizing leadership. What I really mean by it is that we show up as our human selves in the workplace setting. If we're a leader, if we're individual contributors, whatever. Not about being less professional. It is about really acknowledging that the person who's doing the leading is actually still a person. And I do think that one of the biggest M myths in the corporate world in particular, when you become a leader and the more Senior that you go is that you have to stop being a human being. But that's obviously not the case. We feel scared. We can feel threatened. We can feel threatened by another person's success. Success. Uh, sometimes we can feel incompetent. Um, we can be jealous. We can have a bad day. Um, you know, we have relationship breakups, health issues, etc. And, um, all of this comes into the workplace with us. You know, we're all bringing our. Our wishes, our fears, our desires, and our needs. But the more senior we become, and especially if you're striving to become more senior, I think a lot of us feel that we just can't show it. And there's this expectation that were cool, calm and collected under fire in crises. And the reality is that everyone is looking to you. And so there is a bit of truth to that expectation. And as a senior leader myself, I really felt deeply that I could not go into a boardroom or a meeting room with senior management or even with my own people and say, I'm completely overwhelmed. I have no idea what to do here. And one of the things that both Percepta Leadership and this other, uh, center for Applied Psychodynamics that we focus on is helping leaders understand there's a difference between what we call containing emotion and actually denying that we're feeling the emotion. And so when I talk about humanizing leadership, it's really that. It's really acknowledging that you're still a person even when you're a leader.

Speaker B: When I started with the company that I'm with now, I'll never forget somebody said that when things are going on, leave it in the parking lot. When things are going on at home and you come into work, leave it in the parking lot. Don't bring it into work. And when you have a rough day at work, leave it in the parking lot, don't bring it home. And while I think I appreciate it or understand, the sentiment that they're trying to give to my mind speaks directly to what you just mentioned. Because it's not like a light switch. I can't just say, oh, I'm completely overwhelmed by everything happening outside of work. I'm just going to leave all this emotion in the parking lot. And as soon as I walk through those doors at work, it's just magically gone and I'm not dealing with it anymore.

Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. Completely agree. And you know what that reminds me of, Josh? There's an Apple TV show called Severance.

Speaker B: Oh, yeah.

Speaker A: If you've ever seen that or not. But I think that actually came out maybe during the pandemic. It hit me so hard because that's what it felt like I have been doing throughout my career. I don't know that I would go as far as to say I became a different person at work, but I really did show up in a different way. And a lot of the way that I was showing up was. Was highly protected, some might say defensive, and, uh, feeling like I wasn't able to bring as much of my true self into the office space. And of course, the reality is we're still doing it. We're still bringing our true self into the office with us.

Speaker B: Uh, that's why I think it's so important that you brought up containing versus denying these emotions. Because we're going to have emotions and the people that work for us are going to have emotions. And it seems like the more we deny it and the more we try to just squish it down and move out of the way, out of sight, out of mind, is when it comes back even stronger, as opposed to just accepting it, containing it, maybe just saying, I'm having a really bad day, I'm really overwhelmed. And then just allowing the team that you work with to rally behind you and allow you to be this person instead of denying that it even exists in the first place.

Speaker A: I love that point. I think it's actually really important because the more human we can be as leaders, the more permission we give to our people. And again, they are bringing their whole selves into the office space, even if we might. And I know we try so hard, we try so hard to show up in a professional way. And of course we need to do that. That is reality. Particularly in large corporations where there's a lot of structure, where there's a lot of control and expectation for compliance. It becomes tricky in those kinds of business environments to be able to show up as human. But the more we can do that and demonstrate how to appropriately navigate meeting a decision around budgets that didn't go the way that we were hoping it would go, restructuring decisions, all of those business changes that companies are being hit with all the time today, the more we can navigate that with the grace of acknowledging internally that we're experiencing something and we're feeling something, and role modeling how to appropriately manage that in the workplace. We're really actually giving, I, uh, think a real gift to the company, but we're also really helping our people do

Speaker B: the same role modeling. It is so important because if we can't show that we can do it. Saying do as I say, not as I do doesn't fly today, especially with the newer generations and everybody coming in, we tell them something and then we do the exact opposite. They'll see it and then they'll question and go, they said it's okay, but I see them going through it and it doesn't look like it's okay, so should I, uh, or shouldn't I? And it just creates all this confusion in the organization. So the to your point, I think it's just completely critical that we role model it as best as possible. And that, again, allows us to show that we are human and we have these human moments that it's okay to do that, whether we are the leader or we're part of a group that we're reporting up to a different leader.

Speaker A: Wonderful. Completely agree.

Speaker B: So in your experience, when we talk about trying to humanize leadership or maybe seeing that we get dehumanized as a person, the higher we go up in leadership, do you normally see us dehumanize ourselves as we climb that ladder, or are we more so dehumanized by our team when they say, oh my gosh, there's this leader up on this pedestal, they're this perfect non human person? Or is it some kind of mix of both?

Speaker A: Oh, wow. Such a good question. Look, I would say it's probably going to be a mix of both. I think it's really difficult to land on one way or the other. But I think the most important, important thing for leaders to consider is how do we feel about ourselves as a person and in the leadership space? And the kind of dehumanizing ourselves is, I think, a huge topic. I think that leads me to the topic of showing up in ways that are protective. And I think that dehumanizing ourselves can come from that space of real vulnerability. And I need to not feel this because otherwise this is going to happen. I need to not worry about that because otherwise I won't be able to hold it together in this meeting. And I think they're real small, everyday ways that we can be really protective that take us further away from our human experience. And those start to show up as what we would call in psychotherapy defenses. And defenses are human, like, no pun intended, but fundamentally human, fundamentally a part of how complicated we are. And I think that many of us will use unconscious strategies to navigate difficult circumstances. We do that at home, with our partner, with our children, with our parents. We do that on the job as well. Because again, we really can't do what they do on the Severance TV show, we really can't separate our work self from our home self.

Speaker B: So what are some intentional ways that people can trigger when they are being defensive and when they are having that overwhelm, that human side of them, and then what can they do to counteract that?

Speaker A: Yeah, listen, I really want to normalize defenses. As I said, everyone has them. Um, and what's really interesting is that they are not necessarily bad. They are ways of protecting ourselves and, like, getting triggered, becoming, quote, defensive. It's a signal. It's a signal that there's a vulnerability there. There are lots of different kinds of ways that we show up that would be protective of ourselves. Intellectualization is one of them. Perfectionism is one of those ways that I have seen a lot and, uh, I've experienced a lot in my career as well. And I would add compartmentalization to that where, okay, it's like the Severance thing again, maybe we're going to pretend that it's actually not happening while we get work done. And I think that what is really interesting about defenses in the business world, Josh, is that so many of these kinds of defenses actually get rewarded because they look like strengths. So if you think about a leader who is really data driven, okay, that's. First of all, not necessarily a defensive, um, protective response. It could be a personality, like data. Maybe they're an introvert, whatever. I don't want to stereotype here, but if you're a leader and there's a restructuring going on and you're in a meeting room and people are actually sitting around the table worried about the people and the impact to the people, and maybe you are as well. But if you are instead in that moment of feeling anxiety, maybe a little bit of fear, great discomfort around restructuring, and you start talking numbers and spreadsheet and data, ah, that might be a less helpful protective strategy. Okay. Does that make sense in terms of what can trigger us and how it actually might show up?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that makes sense. And I do wonder, as you say all those things, and I know you're talking about kind of the data side of that, but I know you mentioned kind of the perfectionism also is another opportunity there. I'm sure there are tons. How do we balance that? Because as you said, a lot of times we hear defenses and we think bad, something happened. And now I'm putting my walls up and I have these defenses. This is what I'm going to do, detect myself where they are. And they can be seen as strengths. As you Said the output of perfectionism generally is almost perfect work and will go and give us a lot of credit and reward and recognize for that. But at the same time, when you have a defense like that and you try to be perfect everywhere, I can imagine it has also an impact on burnout and energy, other things, because you're driving yourself to that. How do you balance the positive side of a defense like that, but also the maybe either energy or emotional impact it has to the individual.

Speaker A: Okay, excellent points and question perfectionist. That one really lands with me. And actually defense equals bad. I've been labeled in my career as defensive. Sure, I've labeled other people as defensive. And what happens in that moment is that we actually forget about the very real human person and what a defensive reaction is actually telling us. What it's telling us is that there is a vulnerability. And if you are the person who is, you're getting through work through perfectionism. And if it can extract a real cost, it can, to your point, extract a cost on our health, on our relationships, the quality of relationships at work and at home, our relationship to ourself as well. And when we're able to recognize that we've got a pattern of using certain coping strategies that actually aren't serving us well in the long term, that's really the first step, is some self awareness. And what you really want to do is to be curious about it. If you are a leader and you're seeing other people, maybe you're having a performance related conversation with one of the people in your team and they're kind of not accepting it so well. And again, I've been on both sides just being honest here. What we want to do in the moment similarly is to be curious about it because a defensive pattern again is a signal. And you know, we don't want to label it because we are not our defenses. We are real people with a lot going on. But we want to pick up on the cue that we're being given and we want to be really curious about it. And so, for example, if you are a perfectionist and you're realizing that it's actually not serving you and it's actually become what we call maladaptive coping strategy. You want to get curious about your behavior. You want to get curious about, hmm, yeah, maybe I do have high standards, but is there something more to that? Is there? Making a mistake actually feels deeply intolerable to me. Might be something interesting there to look out further. So, yeah, I think I would say curiosity for yourself and for others is A real first step, starting point, especially if you're in the moment and especially if you are working with team members who you're sitting there going, oh, they're being so defensive. Stop, okay, stop that. Your real human reaction of discomfort because it's not comfortable, and become a bit more curious.

Speaker B: You brought up something that I think is so critically important, and it's a mindset that people don't utilize enough. And it's that curiosity mindset. As you spoke about all, uh, that. And we get back to the idea of humanization of ourselves or other people as we're leaders and we think about people being defensive and people maybe that we label as defensive. Most of the time we sit at the table. Tana, you and I are sitting here and I'm going to give you feedback that you may not like and may cause you to be defensive. I can walk in there with all these assumptions that Tana's defensive. So guess what she's going to go do when I go give her this. I'm sure she's going to be defensive. Or I'm the type of person who may dislike conflict. And so I'm going to be there, and I'm not going to look for social cues. I'm going to be there, head down, reading off this paper. I have to give you whatever feedback I need, and then I'm not going to really have that curious mindset to really understand what the impact is. And so in my mind and in my experience, so often I focus on you as the individual being defensive. And I don't think about, is there something that I'm doing as the leader that's making you defensive? Is there a tone and approach that I have as I'm giving this feedback that if I say it this way, you're not going to be defensive at all? And if I say it the way I am here, you're going to be completely, completely defensive. Rather than project the issue as you, I can then assess and be curious about why are you really reacting that way? Maybe it's the delivery. Maybe you're having a terrible day outside of work and this was just the cherry on top of what happened. But we don't ever ask those questions. And I think part of it is because we don't give people the proper leadership training and build their capability. Part of it is in this world of layoffs and productivity, we have people doing 250% of a job now instead of 100. So they're just moving unconsciously from this to that. But it all culminates in this idea of curiosity that you brought up that I think is just so critically important and we don't do that enough.

Speaker A: Oh, wonderful thinking. I think it can be really hard for us, um, to do this kind of work, especially in today's, um, business environment that you've mentioned. Constant high pressure, constant elevating expectations. And we may often feel, and it may also be the objective truth, that we don't have time for this. So it can be really hard. And that really lands with me, Josh. That's part of the struggle of, uh, what does it mean to be a good leader in very difficult times.

Speaker B: That's so spot on. And I do want to talk about something that you mentioned earlier on in the episode about really bringing your whole self to work. And when it comes to bringing your whole self to work, what does that really look like? And how do you balance that with professionalism? How do you balance that with the job that you have? Maybe your leadership style or making sure that you still hold accountability to yourself and others as you bring who you truly are to work? What does all that look like?

Speaker A: Yeah, okay, great question. And it's an important and a fair question because we can sit here and talk about, oh, humanize leadership, but then you get on the job and the real life work circumstances actually happen. So I can personally struggle with the phrase bring your whole self to work. And I have my own journey to how I got to where I am today and, ah, how I navigated that and the times when I really felt that I wanted to be my whole self at work and I felt constrained and I felt pressured to be something quite different. You have to really take a step back and understand in the context of the work does need to get done. And especially if you're a for profit business, you do need to hit your numbers. It becomes a little bit more complicated. And I think there can be an assumption that bringing your whole self to work means that you can bring absolutely everything. I don't think that's healthy either. And I don't think it's realistic to me when I think about what does it mean to bring your whole self to work? It's about recognizing that we already bring our whole self to work, whether we intend to or not. And so what I mean by that is that, uh, our history comes with us. Not all of us are fortunate to have had easy, good beginnings to life. Not all of us have been fortunate enough to carry privilege with us. So we bring all of that with us. We're bringing insecurities with us, we're bringing our ambition with us, and we come together with everyone else that we work with, that we're thrust together together, expected to get along and be able to work together. How do we bring our whole selves to work in this complicated mess of different personalities and needs and insecurities and history, et cetera. So we're bringing all of that. We're bringing our values, we're bringing our sense of humor, we're bringing our relationships, et cetera. So when I talk about humanizing leadership and if we think about bringing your whole self to work, it doesn't mean disclosing the burdens that you're carrying or feeling all of the time. Maybe may be appropriate at times to do that, but in a lot of cases it is in reality, professional boundaries matter and we have to be really careful with that. So what does it mean? I think it means not pretending that those real human needs and desires and fears, et cetera, have no effect on you. And so as a leader, it's appropriate to say, yeah, I'm really finding this decision difficult without unloading your anxiety that you're feeling. So that's the real difference, what we were talking about earlier. That's how we can acknowledge that we're feeling something and contain that versus either denying it or unloading it on other people. Does that make sense?

Speaker B: It does. And it really gets back to that idea that I really. I'd say I've loved everything we've talked, but I really love the deny versus contain thought process because I think that's something that we do consciously or subconsciously all the time we go to work and we don't listen to our feelings enough. And in the, uh, I'd say field that I'm in, a lot of times you want to be more data based than feeling based, because database really tells a lot of the story of what's going on. But if I'm in a situation where I'm feeling anxiety around a decision, it is very helpful to me in my mind to understand why I'm feeling the way I am. And if I'm denying my whole self, whatever it is, and I'm denying the reason that I'm feeling this feeling, I'm never really going to understand that. And as a professional, what if I make a bad decision based on this bad feeling I have without fully understanding? And so I. That's why I think. And that's why I'm latching on to that phrase that you brought up about containing versus denying. Because so often we deny These feelings and try to push them as far down as we can. And because we're overlooking them, we aren't making the most informed, best decisions I feel like that we could be making as we move forward.

Speaker A: Okay, excellent point. And that's, uh, what this is all about, Josh. This is all about. It takes us from how are we feeling? To what are the business implications? What are the implications for me as a leader? How can I be both human and hold people accountable? I don't think that those are opposites. I feel that we can hold people more accountable when they actually trust that we see them as a human being. That gets back to our earlier conversation about role modeling. Giving people the permission to show up in appropriate ways that are regulated but honest. And I think if we can be honest, we're more authentic. And we create those environments where people feel safer, they feel they can trust us, and that's really where the best work, uh, can take place.

Speaker B: That is so important. And I appreciate that. I do appreciate everything we've talked. Like I said, I'm latching onto lots of different tidbits of information that you've brought up. Before we wrap up, is there anything else that you want to share with everybody?

Speaker A: Oh, gosh, no. I'm just really happy that we're having this conversation. I think that we need more of this and that certainly our purpose is to humanize leadership and is to help leaders understand themselves deeply as human beings first. So we're on a mission. And I'm really grateful to you, Josh, that we've had the opportunity to talk about this. Thank you.

Speaker B: Me too. And I want to remind everybody that this is Tana Broadbar. I'm sure you'll want to look her up and find out more information. Obviously, she has a big influence on a lot of different things. Obviously, being a student, teaching and everything, she's doing really impressive things. You can, like, follow and subscribe to my podcast found, uh, on all the podcast platforms. I will have all of her information there, both on the YouTube page and on all the audio platforms that we have, so you can get a hold of her if you'd like. You can subscribe to my Instagram, YouTube and tick tock at Leading Quarters, and you can email me with any questions that you have for myself or for tanaedencourders gmail.com and again, and I know you just said it, but humanizing leadership, dehumanizing ourselves, all of these things that are happening sadly so naturally to us today is so important for us to truly understand because once we understand it, we can actually do something about it, whether it's leaning into it or altering an approach or whatever. And I think just you being here today and sharing that with everybody was the first step on the journey to get to where we need to be. So I really, truly appreciate that.

Speaker A: Thank you so much. Really happy to be here.

Speaker B: Um.