The Blog of
TEAM WORK EXCELLENCE
TEAM WORK EXCELLENCE
Episode Summary: In this episode of Sweet on Leadership, Tim Sweet introduces a four-part framework for navigating leadership in uncertain times. He begins with The Drift, identifying control, confusion, and collapse as signs of misalignment, not failure. In The Reset, he calls leaders to reconnect with purpose and energy by making small, aligned decisions. The Reach focuses on guiding teams with clarity and adaptability, while The Practice reframes transformation as a continuous, intentional discipline. Tim closes with a call to return to what truly matters, reshape ourselves, and lead the future with resilience and purpose.
Episode Notes In this episode of Sweet on Leadership, Tim Sweet guides us through his four-part framework of leadership transformation amidst today’s instability. In The Drift, Tim helps leaders recognize the subtle signs of misalignment—control, confusion, and collapse—as natural but unsustainable coping mechanisms. He unpacks how these reactions stem not from personal failure but from the emotional weight of leading in a constantly shifting world. The key, he says, is not pushing harder, but stepping back to reconnect with the foundation of leadership itself. From there, we move into The Reset, a call to return to purpose and audit the energy we give to people and projects. Tim encourages listeners to make just one aligned decision and let small, intentional actions build toward bigger change. In The Reach, he explores how leaders can guide their teams with clarity and truth—not by solving every problem, but by anchoring to what matters most and adapting as needed. Finally, in The Practice, Tim reframes transformation as a modular, ongoing discipline. It’s not about heroic reinvention, but honest, daily choices that reshape how we lead from the inside out. The episode closes with a powerful reminder: this isn’t about fixing others or waiting for normal to return—it’s about returning to our bedrock, reshaping ourselves, and choosing to lead what’s next with resilience and purpose. If you’re feeling the pull to lead differently, this conversation offers the clarity and calm you didn’t know you needed. Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Transcript Tim 00:01 When outside forces are bucketing us around, politically, socially, economically, and our people are bringing in more fear into the workplace, and our clients are more hesitant than ever, and the whole world seems like it is on tilt. We're still supposed to be leaders, and that can feel sometimes like a fantasy. By the end of this episode, you're going to have a clear sense of what might be holding you back. And I'll give you some practical ways that we can go forward, not through more effort, because we know today, capacity is an issue, energy is an issue. Not through more effort, but through better alignment, alignment with your purpose and alignment with who you are. You're going to walk away with some new language, some new structure and hopefully a new mindset, so that you can go through these resets and lead with clarity again. So if you're a leader and you felt more tired, more scattered and more unsure lately, this episode is the one you need. Tim 1:06 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable. If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. I'm Tim Sweet. I'd like to welcome you to the 54th episode of the sweet on leadership podcast. Tim 1:38 Welcome. Perhaps you feel like you're the only one that is struggling today, I want you to know you're not alone. A lot of the smartest, most capable leaders that I work with, the ones that are at the very top of organizations, are saying the same thing. I don't know if what I'm doing is the right thing, and I have days where I'm not sure I'm enough. It's not just the pressure that is coming down to deliver our strategies and our mandates. There is a new fear, a new anxiety and a new emotional weight that's on everyone you your team, your customers, the people you serve. It's the fact that the ground keeps shifting today, not just that things are tumultuous, but everything is changing week on week. Yet you're supposed to stay steady yet you have long range commitments that you need to make. Speaker 1 2:31 A lot more time spent on investments or politics. Those are the things where people are having conversations. Speaker 2 2:38 We've all got budget pressures. The political noise. Staff complaining. Faculty complaining. Students are complaining. It's all piling up, and people seem hesitant and guarded, and we used to be more collegial. Now it just feels, just feels like everybody's getting by, just trying not to drop the ball. Speaker 3 3:00 I don't think I've seen work like this. I haven't seen teams, still smiling, but just tightly wound. Speaker 4 3:09 I've been spending more time managing how people feel than actually moving work forward. We need to hit deadlines, and it's like everybody's tired. Speaker 5 3:18 And I can't slow down. I've kept myself checking in on things more often, just making sure things are moving along. And I'm mentally frazzled. It's just so much more frustrating, and this is what I'm hearing from my team. Tim 03:38 Okay, let's talk about leadership exhaustion. Some days, leadership doesn't feel like it's as simple as simply carrying the vision forward inspiring people. It feels like trying to stay upright and holding on to people amidst this flood of uncertainty. Today, you're going to be navigating complexity, managing expectations, carrying emotions of others, and somewhere in all of that, you're supposed to be clear, you're supposed to be stalwart, you're supposed to be steady. But lately, a lot of leaders are finding themselves in this type of fog. They're not broken, they're not necessarily burned out we’re just caught in this limbo. We're between two worlds, the world we were prepared for and that everything worked in, and this other world, this unknown future where we're standing now. It's this limbo that has us feeling adrift, and it's here, when we feel this way that we have to be the ones to first find purchase. This is how we get set to transform and rebuild. It's not recovery, it's not resilience, in the way of being broken and then having to get fixed again. We're actually talking about being break resistant. Because in this environment, transformation isn't a one time pivot. We can't just change things around us. There's that saying that says everybody wants progress, but nobody wants change. Well here change even isn't enough. We have to transform, and that ability to transform and to really evolve oneself is a continuous skill. Tim 05:30 Let's talk about the drift. When the pressure around us builds, the highest performing leaders fall into one of three states, typically. We have ones that tend to opt for control. They take everything on themselves, they tighten their grip, they micromanage. It's a form of leadership that's more about protecting others, but really it's over functioning. It's trying to make everyone safe. It's trying to bring everything home yourself. It's trying to be the hero. The second camp that people fall into is one that is confused. They're pivoting constantly. Everything feels urgent, everything feels like a threat, and they lose the thread of what actually matters. And in third camp, we actually see collapse. We see people going through certain motions, but quietly, just checking out. They're still doing the job, but they're finding ways to divest themselves from caring too deeply, because that's just painful. These aren't character flaws necessarily. They're coping strategies, and they're what we see in response to a world that keeps moving the goal posts. We have to remember that many of us, all of us, have been through the trauma of the pandemic, and we learned coping mechanisms just to get through the day. Those coping mechanisms for many people are reasserting themselves. It's how we dealt with great degrees of uncertainty and polarization. Tim 7:10 And polarization is a big deal. In today's world, things are more polarized. Things are more emotionally charged. People are taking things very personally, not just from a dogmatic perspective or a belief perspective, but also because this is hitting them in the pocketbook. Things are becoming economically unstable. These are things that you feel. And when the clarity and the certainty that we're okay disappears, we begin this kind of drift. It's just like a boat that's lost its anchor. We can't lead people well from that place. We've got no steerage on, we've got no forward momentum, we have no wind to drive our sails, we have no water moving over the rudder. So because what's forward looks so scary, we tend to go back to a previous version of ourselves, like an image on your computer drive the thing that was the last version of your computer that was working before you got a bug. Going back to the previous version of ourselves isn't always the best way to go. We don't need to go back to the previous version we need to actually dive deep and go back to what is foundational, back to that bedrock, which are the simplest possible terms of what we are and what we're meant to be. Tim 13:02 This brings us to the reset. Resetting is not just about calming down, and it's definitely not about simply changing the strategy and changing things that are around us so that we can stay the same. It's actually saying this new way of operating requires a new version of us, and so we have to transform, and we have to transform in real time, because our old assumptions and our old way of being don't fit the time. This doesn't mean a wholesale reinvention. That would be incredible. You can't become a different person, and we don't want to start from scratch, because that's just incredibly overwhelming and exhausting. Instead, what we need to do is return to what's essential and then build back up selectively so that we can address where as leaders, do we have things that will work in the future state and will not work in the future state. What about our strategy works? What about our strategy doesn't? What about our processes and how we lead them works and what doesn't? And what about our people and our teams and how they're engaged and what works and what doesn't? And if you want to go one step further, we have to look at our interest holders or our customers? Are they working for us? Do they need to change? If we're going to shift any of those things, we have to get into this state of creativity. Tim 10:13 So step one, we need to reconnect with our purpose. You've heard Sinek say “your why” not the one in the strategic plan, not the purpose that's on your company mission statement, but the one that lives in here in your gut. Who are you designed to be? How do you express yourself in this world as being a powerful entity? Why are you here? And why are you right for this moment, that's what you have to connect to. Tim 10:45 Step two, we need to audit your energy. What parts of your work are giving you life, despite all the confusion, which are giving you a sense of driving you forward and are drawing you forward or pulling you forward. You're not pushing rope. You're actually enthused with what you're working on and what parts of your life and your work and your roles are draining you? What have you been tolerating that in this new, more brittle future you can no longer tolerate? We have to now become very economic with how we're spending our time and how we're how we're expending energy. Burnout often hides in the gap between our values and who we think we need to be and the demands of our calendar. And we try to be this and do this. And those two things don't always mesh. We have to be much more selective and find methods and processes that allow us to balance those two things. Tim 11:54 Step three, we need to make one decision. We need to make one move at a time towards alignment, not multiple moves. We need to take one step towards agency. You don't need a grand plan, and you don't need to be working things all simultaneously. The reason is this has to be experimental, and you're going to be creating and trying something and seeing if it makes life better. And you can't do that if you are changing multiple multiple factors at once. Tim 12:26 You don't need that grand plan, but you do need to prove things out. And most importantly, your brain is going to be learning this entire time. You need to prove to yourself that you're not powerless in a seemingly massive and uncontrolled situation where you feel like such a small fish in such a large pond. Tim 12:47 Transformation happens properly in small ways, right? We don't try to evolve everything at once. We try to look at how do we need to evolve, and then make selective adaptations. If we go at things with this scalpel rather than a shotgun approach, we can approach things modularly. We can change out one thing at a time. Tim 13:15 This is the practice, and it's what as a leader, we have to train our egos and our brains and our instincts to serve. When is it time to initiate another one of these recreations, another one of these adaptations, another one of these transformations. Tim 13:39 A sustainable transformation that's not going to destroy us and have to completely build us up from the bottom. Happens in small modular bites. These small choices that allow us to sense something needs to change, test it out, and then make that change and go for something new. It is a creative process. It would be like trying to paint a picture where you want to change something about the picture, so you wipe everything off. No, you don't do that. You look at what is wrong with this image, and then you push a little bit of paint around. You add a little bit of red here and a little bit of green there. It is a creative exercise. It's an artistic exercise. It's releasing something that has always been there and has just been cluttered up. Tim 14:32 This sense that something needs to change, and then we get foundational, and then it becomes manageable. Is a practice. It's a discipline. Because once we can do that, and we can tolerate, then we can enter this kind of creative, experimental stage where we can try different things on. That's how we evolve. That's how we build ourselves into something new. Tim 14:56 And when we build ourselves into something new, and we do it right, you know what? We don't feel like we had to become somebody else. No, we're making choices. There's a lot of agency here, right? And we're making better choices, because these are all steps that are closer to who we were ultimately meant to be. And yet, I talk a lot about fluency. I talk about having a clear idea of what your ultimate expression looks like, because that gives us a true north about where we want to go and when we're in periods of transition and transformation, crisis like this, that true north, that clear vision of who I'm meant to be. It allows us to make some very logical decisions. It's like a game of hot and cold. You know, when a move is getting you warmer, warmer, not colder, colder, warmer, it's towards where you need to be. Tim 16:01 All right, so once you've done the internal work, which again, is to get back down to this foundation of who I am, what am I meant to be, and what can I change? And what am I going to work on first. it's time to guide others. The reason is they're going to be going through the same things. And you can take a look at them and say, All right, which ones are stepping up their level of control, trying to gather more control, which ones are confused and getting creative and trying to just throw spaghetti at the wall, and which ones are choosing to disengage, and they're kind of collapsing in that way. You need to help them through it, coach them through it, because if you don't, they're going to be a constant drag on your energy. You cannot supplement them through this. You cannot be the hero. You have to help them find their own stability. When we do that, we will be working through them to help them. name, what's real in their lives. What are they dealing with? As leaders, our best approach is to speak plainly, speak in terms that are real. We don't need to sugar coat things. We have to be kind, but we don't need to sugar coat things, and we don't need to dramatize things, because we don't want to engage in mental manipulation. We don't want to be fooling them through things that are okay. That's not a way to build stability for others. We want to bring truth into the room. We want to focus our teams on what matters most right now, the essential work, the parts of the strategy, what we're going to see through, and where you expect them to be. We might have that long term goal, but we also need to have short term goals in terms of what are we going to work on in this team to become that new thing. We want to make sure that we reassert the values that we've always had and the ones which we refuse to compromise on, because we can't shift our values and expect to be happy a few months down the road. So, here's a shift that you want to start to engage in stop treating this new tension like something that you can manage. Treat it like something you need to understand and then be able to work with. Thirnk of it like a new current in the water. We need to be able to not only navigate it, but we need to be able to utilize it to move forward effectively. Tim 18:40 The tensions reveal why our old ways no longer fit with new realities. And when we start to think in terms of tensions and conflicts, it helps us understand where our systems and our behaviors and our beliefs and our identity and our assumptions and our fears and our myth, etc, need to be evolved. Need to be either proven true or need to be disregarded. Transformation isn't one big moment, it's 1000 small realignments. They're modular, they're intentional, and they're ongoing. And this might seem overwhelming, but for a moment, just stop and think, when there's no crisis and we're just going through business generally, we are constantly rebasing things. We might have gone through a project or a particularly tough time, and we look back at and say, oh, we were good enough to get through that. Well, that's actually something that we want to call out as being a success bias, we forget that. You know, that road to that success was full of small adjustments and often transformations. The only thing here right now is the threat seems so much more out of the norm, but the fundamentals remain the same. You don't have to overhaul everything. In fact, you shouldn't. We simply have to get really real and then find the parts that no longer serve, and we reshape those parts. We transform those parts. And this is how teams change. This is how culture changes. Whether or not you have a new person join the team, or a new leader join the team, or you're pointed in a substantially different direction. For us, our transformation is how our leadership becomes sustainable, and it's how our trust in ourselves becomes sustainable. Once we realize that we are creatures of transformation and creatures of reinvention, then we're okay. So let's talk a little bit about the practice, because this doesn't really get talked about enough. We always just think, we go ahead and we do it. None of this is a one-and-done. You are not transforming once. You are transforming often. And as I say, You're a creature of transformation. Sometimes these have to be more profound than others, and they feel bigger. Sometimes we do this on an organizational level, new roles, new teams, reorganization, strategic shifts, brand new leaders. But more often, they happen in small ways, and they happen constantly. They can happen in the moment of how we speak in a meeting, how we hold a boundary or a line, how we choose to be present and listen in the moment over panicking, when we choose to calm people down or offer a, You know, a gentle push in the right direction. the idea of transformation is something that we need to normalize. We have to make space for it. We have to consider it as a practice, not a crisis response. Yes, if you're feeling this way, a crisis is causing you to listen to me right now, but this should be a change that you make now, and you carry this as a practice forward for the rest of your leadership journey. Tim 22:09 It is okay as an individual and as a leader to feel wobbly, to not know that something is just right. Often we fake our way through this. Instead, we want to realize that we have slipped out of our sense of control, and we want to get real and honest with that, and then approach it in a very intentional way. You don't need a lot of fancy language to do this, or a polished leadership message. You don't need to gain some sort of a degree in order to be good at this. Instead, we need to be intentional and present. You need to notice where friction lives in yourself and in your team, and you need to notice what old habits and myths and structures are grinding against what you need now. Transformation starts with this incredible amount of honesty, and once we are honest and we can put ourselves between that immovable object and that irresistible force, we feel momentum and we're encouraged forward. And I use that word intentionally, because being encouraged is being filled with courage that we're headed in the right direction, and that makes it very easy for people to feel that energy and that certainty. You can bring that to yourself so you have a better Monday and a better Friday, and you can bring that to your team so that they're less likely to want to jump ship because they start blaming the job, instead of recognizing that it's simply a time to change and we can stop blaming the work and letting it run roughshod over us and sap us of all of our energy and overwhelm us with capacity challenges. You're only three months into this insanity. We have at least two to four years of this coming, so you may be tempted to wait it out, but the people who are going to make it through this in fine, fine style, are the ones that are going to realize they're in a fog and decide to get through it, not just adapt enough to survive, but actually to become that thing that they were always meant to become. Don't waste a good crisis. So maybe it's time to shoot for something a little bit deeper. I encourage you to get open about stripping back to what's true and what matters most, and what fits this moment and who you need to be today and build from there. Because the leaders that we need now aren't the ones who are claiming to have all the answers, because, frankly, we don't know what the future is going to look like. They're the ones that are willing to transform, they're ones that are willing to connect with others and create spaces for dialog, and they're the ones that are able to do this over and over again in the service of something meaningful. So trust yourself that you are enough, start from where you are, in fact, start beneath that, from who you really are and what you really want, and then with just your first step, with that first decision, with that first act of clarity, you can move. Tim 25:52 Thanks for taking this moment to be here with me for investing in yourself and your own growth. If you found this little method helpful, I'd encourage you to share it with somebody who might be carrying more stress and weight than they let on. And this week, get excited, because this is a tremendous opportunity to stimulate that growth and that transformation in yourself, figuring out how to get one step closer to that ultimate expression of potential and lead wherever this crazy world takes us. All right, see you soon. Tim 26:33 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If, like us you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership, please give us a positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders, and you can spread the word too by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening, and be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet encouraging you to keep on leading. Tim 26:33 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If, like us you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership, please give us a positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders, and you can spread the word too by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening, and be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet encouraging you to keep on leading. Comments are closed.
|
Click to set custom HTML
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
