(Kristiana Corona)
Hey there, friend. Welcome to the Worthy to Lead podcast. I'm your host, Kristiana Corona, and I'm so glad you're here for our very first episode. My hope is that you'll find this podcast series to be inspiring and thought -provoking, that it's gonna challenge your assumptions of what it means to be a leader and invite you to see things from a new perspective. I wanna be the resource, the friend, and the advisor that is by your side as you go through the good days, the bad days and everything in between. I'm gonna share tools that I created to help you progress faster in your journey so you don't have to do things the hard way like I did.
In today's episode, I will be sharing a little bit more about my journey as a leader, the ups and downs, some of the lessons that I learned, and all the things that really got me to where I am today. And as I go through my story, I'm going to pull out some of the key moments that led to shifts in my mindset, because I want to give you the tools that you can actually use to evaluate your own approach in the same situation. And most importantly, I'll share the one thing that changed everything about how I lead and how it helped me to feel so much more worthy to lead than ever before. All right, are you ready? Let's get started.
I'm guessing at some point when you started to lead teams, or maybe if you're just thinking about becoming a leader, you had the thought, I'm not worthy to lead this team. Why would they wanna follow me? What do I even have to offer as a leader that they don't already know?
This, my friend, is exactly where I started my leadership journey in 2008. I was working at a large global logistics company called CH Robinson in their marketing department as a website designer, and I thought I had struck gold. I was about six years into my career as a designer at that point, and this was exactly the job that I had dreamed of. I was spending my days deep in design and delivering meaningful work for the organization.
And I was good at it. I knew how to do my job. I felt confident and I was having so much fun. So one day my boss came up to me and he told me that he had a vision for taking our small but mighty marketing team and turning it into a world -class global marketing organization. And then he said these fateful words. I want you to help me build it. You are going to be a manager now.
I remember thinking, uh, what? You have to be kidding me. I had no experience leading people and I wasn't even sure if I wanted to. I was very flattered, obviously, that my boss had confidence in my abilities, but I was very unprepared. I felt like my stomach was in knots. I was clammy and somewhat panicked. And this felt like such a big decision to make.
I would be giving up a job that I loved to do for something that was completely outside my comfort zone. How was I supposed to know if this was right for me? As I thought about it a little bit more, while taking lots of deep breaths, I began to envision what the organization could look like in the future and I will admit, I felt a little spark growing inside of me.
There was something adventurous and exciting about building an organization from the ground up. It was like being a pioneer. When was I ever gonna have a chance like this again? And I knew in that moment that even though it scared the crap out of me, I had to do it. So I pushed aside all of my feelings of unworthiness. I took a deep breath and I said, okay, I'm in.
So let's pause here. Maybe you haven't been given an opportunity to build a world -class marketing organization, but I'm guessing that there have been opportunities that have come your way that scared you. Things that made you feel that weird sensation of exhilarating excitement and shaky panic all at the same time. So what did you do when that opportunity presented itself? Did you fearlessly leap in? Or did you freeze? Maybe you procrastinated on making a decision by analyzing it from every possible angle. Or maybe you asked everyone else what they thought you should do because the idea of making that decision on your own was too much pressure. For me, it showed up like a rush of adrenaline quickly followed by the feeling of jumping off of a cliff and having no idea where I was going to land.
Yikes. Nowadays, when I encounter these scary but exhilarating opportunities, I like to use a framework that helps me think things through just a little bit more clearly than I did back then. So I'm hoping that this can help you as well. First, I will ask myself, what is the best outcome that could happen in this situation if I was wildly successful? I will like visualize myself doing the job or the project and think about the positive impact that I could have. And then I think about the things I could learn. How could this help me to become more of the leader that I want to be? Then I will ask, what am I afraid could happen if I say yes? Am I afraid of failure, embarrassment? Maybe they'll see that I'm an imposter. Is this fear based on solid evidence or is this rooted in my feelings of unworthiness? How likely is it that my worst fears would actually happen? And is there anything that I could do to prevent that?
Finally, I like to think about the trade-offs. What am I giving up if I say yes? There will be something that I won't have time to do or that I won't be able to do because I'm doing this instead. So is it worth it? On the other hand, what will happen if I say no or do nothing? What am I gonna lose out on?
This framework has been really helpful when making high stakes decisions, especially ones that feel somewhat intimidating or completely new. After carefully thinking through these questions, I have a greater sense of clarity and confidence and maybe even a little bit of peace about the situation. Don't worry, I will be sharing all these insights and frameworks in the show notes that go along with the podcast, so you don't need to take any notes. You can find all of them at worthytoleadpodcast.com/1.
Alright, let's keep going with this story.
So I took on the new manager role and as you might imagine, I was faced with many unfamiliar situations. Really tough prioritization questions, disagreements between coworkers, holding a high quality of standard.
Holding a high standard of quality for work when I wasn't even making it anymore. Helping people solve problems in roles that I had never done myself and providing direction for my team when I had no idea what the right path forward was. I'm not going to sugarcoat this. I was really overwhelmed and it wasn't pretty. I'm pretty sure the team felt my incompetence on a daily basis and I knew their patience was running out. There were many tears of frustration that were shed in my office on both sides.
The biggest learning from those first few months as a manager was that the skills that made me an excellent individual contributor were not enough to be effective at the next level. I had to learn a brand new set of skills like delegation, providing clear direction and managing people's performance. And I had to learn them fast.
I went forward and got some management training, but I felt like the approach was a bit corporate-y, kind of like speaking some foreign HR language that didn't really feel authentic. I tried mimicking what other leaders around me were doing, even when it didn't align with my own instincts. And that didn't go very well either. I tried to lean in and help with the work where I could, but I got very clear signals from my team that being micromanaged was killing their creativity. And I knew that this wasn't how I wanted to lead, but I just didn't know what good looked like for me. I was desperate to get to the other side and just know what I was doing already.
I worked so hard to try and live up to this new role that I was always in burnout mode. I would try to handle everything on my own without asking for help. I would try and get ahead by working every night and even on the weekends. I set no boundaries on how much time I was working and relationships with my husband and my kids suffered because of it. Nobody liked this burned out, exhausted or frustrated version of me. And neither did I. I contemplated giving up on management. Maybe it's just too hard. Or maybe I don't have the right personality. Had I made a huge mistake?
If you're squirming in your chair right now, feeling the anxiety and the awkwardness of this phase of my leadership journey, that's exactly what I was hoping for. That nagging sensation of inadequacy, that's what it feels like to be a beginner. And absolutely nobody wants to be in that place, but we all have to go through it in order to achieve things that matter. I'm not going to lie, it's super uncomfortable.
I would get flashbacks all the time of things that I had failed at starting back in middle school when I tried to give a speech in front of the class and I stood there staring like a deer in headlights because I totally forgot the words. Yeah, just like that. So the reason I'm telling you this story, this is obviously a part I could have glossed over or just pretended that I didn't go through, is because I want you to know that if you're feeling overwhelmed and uncomfortable or if you're just at the beginning of your leadership journey, there is hope, my friend.
Like the wise mentors I had during this time did for me, I have created a few prompts for you to start shifting your mindset. I encourage you to consider these as thought starters and create some of your own.
First, this awkwardness or anxiety that I'm feeling means that I am pushing myself further than I ever have before. And that is something to be proud of.
Second, These feelings of unworthiness won't last forever. They are signals to pay attention to, but they do not define your identity or what you're capable of.
Third, you are in a growing phase or a rebuilding phase right now. And the only direction you have to go is up.
Fourth, all great leaders started at the beginning. You often see them farther down the path, but don't think that they didn't go through the same struggles.
And fifth, this one's my favorite. 10 years from now, you'll look back on this moment and be amazed at how far you've come because you didn't give up.
Adopting a growth mindset like this allows you to continue to feel the discomfort, but to give it new meaning and to know that it's not gonna last forever. Rather than trying to avoid the pain, you can embrace it as part of a necessary process that is going to make you better, which is exactly what I did.
To be completely vulnerable, I'm doing it right now, launching this podcast as a beginner. There's plenty of doubts and questions that are swirling around in my mind, things that could have prevented me from taking action. But the tools I just shared have really helped me in moments like this one to first recognize that feeling and then to give it a new meaning and just keep going. Plus,
I've decided that you are worth getting uncomfortable for. So here we are. So getting back to my story.
Instead of giving up, I pushed through the discomfort and I tried to keep an open mind and just ask for feedback on how I could do better. And I did, I slowly made progress and I built trust with the team. I gained confidence day by day, but it wasn't all roses after that. As the size of my teams grew, I found it harder and harder to manage the details, the decisions, and especially all the deadlines for the team. I was so deep in the weeds that I was starting to become a bottleneck. And I wasn't able to spend time on my own work, like defining strategy or thinking about the big picture. My to-do list seemed like it was never ending and I still worked long hours. Cue burnout. I feared I would never be able to go on vacation because there just wasn't time.
But in 2016, I attended a corporate leadership training that changed everything. By that point, I had left CH Robinson and gone to Target to lead a team for target .com. I was on the third day of a three-day immersive leadership training in a room full of leaders that were at various levels of experience. The course instructor asked for a volunteer to do an executive coaching demonstration.
For the next 45 minutes, I observed how this coaching guru listened attentively to the leader's challenges, asked questions, getting them to think about things from different perspectives. But even when she was being asked a direct question on how to solve the leader's problem, which kept happening over and over again, she never once responded with an answer. Instead, she would turn it back to the leader to explore their own ideas.
Okay, so here's what shocked me about all of this. By the end of the session, without receiving a single piece of advice from the coach, the leader had solved their own problem and committed to a confident plan of action. I remember my jaw almost hitting the floor. Like, what was this? This is like some secret psychological magic. And I just knew that I had to learn more.
This was my first taste of executive coaching and I was totally hooked. I immersed myself in coaching. I was reading any resource I could get my hands on. I started practicing techniques on my team and I ended up getting my own executive coach through a student
I ended up getting my own executive coach through a student certification program. So I was the guinea pig for a coaching student and it was totally worth it. I learned so much that helped transform me to be the leader that I wanted to be. And eventually I went back to school at the University of Texas Dallas to get my master's level training and an executive coaching certification through the International Coaching Federation, the ICF.
Being fully immersed in coaching best practices, psychology, neuroscience, it was so fascinating. Throughout that time, I spent hundreds of hours coaching every single day as part of my leadership role, and I loved every minute. Okay, so you might be asking, what exactly changed? What exactly changed in my leadership style and how did that impact my team?
The biggest shift that I made was no surprise to listen more and ask questions instead of immediately providing answers or advice. I'll say that again. I stopped telling them what to do. I never gave them an answer to a question right away, which, you know, that's really easy to say, but in reality is so hard to do.
In a world where we are expected to be the smartest person in the room and prove our value by telling others what to do, this feels like counter-cultural. But here's why it's important and here's why it works. By not giving my team all the answers, I challenged them to think like leaders do, to be more strategic and to make decisions like this was their own business.
My role started to shift to encouraging them, holding them to a high standard, helping them think things through the way that I would. And when I started to see these changes, I wasn't satisfied anymore with having a team of order takers. I wanted to develop a team of leaders.
And over time, as I used coaching as part of my leadership roles at Target and USAA and Amazon, my teams began to gain confidence in their own skills and ideas. And as that boldness grew, they started taking more risks and proposing new ideas. They stopped asking me for permission and they started telling me their plans. They handled problems much more independently and they started mentoring others who were struggling. And the best part was this freed me up to spend time on the things I had always wanted to: Looking ahead, driving strategy, even cultivating innovation. I could finally take a vacation because every decision didn't depend on me. And I knew my team was capable to handle things while I was gone.
Not only is coaching an inspiring way to lead, but it can also truly transform lives. I've had women overcome imposter syndrome and step up for promotions more and receive them. I've seen individual contributors go from zero strategic experience to co -creating their team's annual plans in the same year. I've had designers earn a seat at the table with leaders two and three levels above them and negotiate confidently. And I've helped leaders overcomes doubt, communication barriers, burnout, and self-imposed ceilings. And I celebrate every time my coachees proactively take on challenges that scare them, knowing that they are capable to figure things out.
So in a nutshell, the transformative power of coaching as a leadership style is the reason I started this podcast. It has had such a profound impact on my life and the lives of my team members, my peers, and the other leaders that I coach.
So here's what I want you to take away. If I started out as the world's worst, most awkward manager and I used coaching to transform into a confident and strategic leader that impacts lives, so can you. In this podcast series, I'm gonna provide you with easy to use tools, inspiration and interviews with other great leaders to cultivate your authentic blend of leadership and coaching. My goal for you is that you will leave these episodes full of actionable ideas and have some confidence that you are worthy to lead. I'm so excited that you're on this journey with me and I can't wait to see you next time. Bye for now.
So thanks for joining me on our very first Worthy to Lead podcast episode. It was so fun to share my story with you all.
To get access to the show notes and the frameworks that I shared today, go to worthytoleadpodcast.com/1, which is the number one. You can also sign up there to get notified every time I release a new episode so you don't miss a thing. I hope you will join us next time. Have a great week.
Hope you'll join us next time.
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