Cindy Donaldson (00:01.102)
Hey everybody, it's Cindy Donaldson and welcome to the Cindy Donaldson show. You are in the right place if you are feeling stuck in your life, stuck in your career, just knowing that there's something better out there and you don't know how the hell to get there. So today, I really want to focus on the career part of where you are. I recently did a day long training program for the Connecticut Bankers Association entitled Leading From the Inside Out.
I'm a firm believer that you can't lead others until you learn how to lead yourself. What does that even mean? Well, buckle up because I'm going to share some really cool insights that a lot of people really don't think about. Usually when you think about leadership, you're thinking about how to make teams more productive, how to run a company effectively, how to manage people. And yes, that's all in there.
But when I talk about leading from the inside out, like you have to really understand who you are and why it matters if you want to inspire others. So if you're new to my, leadership side of what I do here in my companies, I'm a believer that great leaders have four main things that make them up. One, they have to be able to inspire others.
meaning that you are the general, you're leading troops into battle, people need to look at you and feel inspired that everything is going to be okay, that you will get them to where they need to go in a very safe and sometimes happy, fun way, right? But you have to be inspirational. You have to be inspirational. Did you ever like go to an event and somebody walks in the room and they just have that energy?
They have that incredible, powerful energy that says, ooh, I need to get to know them. They're important. People who have a really high leadership number, who have learned how to inspire others, walk into a room, and I've said this before, a little bit cocky and a lot a bit confident. They're inspirational.
Cindy Donaldson (02:19.713)
And I don't mean like you have to be Tony Robbins inspirational, like fired up that kind of inspirational. But again, it kind of goes back to this almost a psychological safety thing. people who are great leaders inspire us to believe that we can do hard things, even if we don't believe it in ourselves. And they create a space for us to grow and for us to fail. That's true inspiration.
Two, great leaders teach. They're not afraid to give away the secrets that are in their brain, right? If you want to move up the corporate ladder within your company, you have to teach somebody else to do your job. In this day-long program that I did, I ran into a lot of emerging leaders who got really frustrated when their team couldn't do something as quickly as they could. So what did they do?
They just did it themselves. And I was like, no, you have to teach them to have, and so they have the skills to do that themselves. Otherwise you will never be able to step into your true genius or you will never be able to get out of that role. You need to empower them and teach them. So they have the confidence to do the hard things. And going back to that inspire, you have to allow them to fail. Give them a safe space to fail.
Give them a safe space to ask questions. Give them a safe space to come into their own. You have to be a teacher and a mentor. Three, you have to challenge them. And what I mean by that is you have to push them a little bit outside their comfort zone, but be careful you're not trying to make a fish climb a tree.
I often share that when I was the director of sales and marketing for an insurance agency, my boss, whom I still have a great relationship with by the way, wanted me to check applications before of the salespeople before they went off to underwriters. And I was like, you don't want me to do that. I do not catch typos. An error can slap me in the face. That is not who I am. It is not part of my superpowers. I'm a visionary.
Cindy Donaldson (04:41.92)
I'm a leader, I inspire, I can teach. But you want to give this to somebody that it is their superpower because having that, it is truly, I would be a fish trying to climb a tree and that gives me incredible anxiety. But that doesn't mean that, you know, you shouldn't push people to learn new things. But it kind of goes back to, you know, the great leaders, right? Great leaders know their team.
They know the people that they are trying to lead. They know their strengths and weaknesses and they know what would be characterized as making them be the fish, you know, climbing the tree or pushing them outside of their comfort zone to become a better version of who they are. Lastly, great leaders always model the way. If the boat is sinking, the first person to grab a bucket should be the leader. When the team is doing well, a leader never
takes the credit for the win. The credit goes to the team. But when the team is struggling, a great leader always falls on the sword and takes responsibility for that because it always trickles up. So keeping that in mind, those are the four tenets of what I believe make a great leader. Now take that and then there's a second layer to it, which is this whole concept of leading from the inside out.
And it becomes, well, it doesn't become, it starts with self-awareness. And I just had this conversation with a client who is, you know, working on defining roles within a company. Great leaders are self-aware. They're aware of their triggers. They are aware of what they're good at and what they're not good at. They are aware of what they should do themselves and what they should offload to a team. And offload, I mean, giving things to people that it is in their genius.
That's why in leadership, have cabinets, we have C-suites. Leaders are visionaries, managers manage a process. True leaders inspire others to take action, inspire them to believe that they can do hard things. But when a leader isn't self-aware of what their triggers are what that means, like for me, I have ADHD. A triggering thing for me is people
Cindy Donaldson (07:10.642)
is when people aren't moving quickly enough and I get very frustrated. So one of my earliest leadership big fails was thinking that somebody could do something as quickly as I am if it was in my genius. So I can write very quickly. I can create content very quickly. It is just my superpower. I don't need five hours to write an article.
But I would get very frustrated when somebody on my team would take five hours to write an article, when in fact, an average normal person, it would take that long. Now there were other things that my staff could do very quickly that would take me five hours, but being self-aware of that and not getting reactionary over it. So now I have to step back and I put my empathy hat on and say, okay,
Is this something that I need to really help my team with? Do they not understand the assignment? Do they need extra resources? Or is it something that they just need to take five hours because that's what it needs to be? But you have those conversations. You figure out why something is taking longer than you think, and then you assess. Do they need more help? Is it something that am I trying to make a fish climb a tree here?
So the self-awareness is one of the first tenants of leading from the inside out. You have to know who the hell you are and why it matters. You have to know also your personal mission, vision and values. What makes you up? Because if you have people on your team who do not align with your mission, vision and values, you will always struggle. You will always struggle. Your C-suites, if you are the CEO, your C-suites in a large company need to absolutely
100 % drink your Kool-Aid and compliment you at the same time.
Cindy Donaldson (09:12.423)
Number two is emotional intelligence. Now we've been talking a lot about empathy. Emotional intelligence is far more important than like an IQ. So EQ trumps IQ 100 % of the time when it comes to great leadership and is probably the second most important thing of leading from the inside out. You have to be able to put yourself in your team's shoes, but not necessarily from your point of view.
from a point, like you truly have to get in their head in that space for where they are in their life. So it's not like, what would I do in that situation? But really try to understand what they're going through in this situation where they're struggling. What's important to them? What are their mission, vision and values? What do they want this outcome to be if you're working on a project and you're struggling? Like you need to understand that.
because everybody is motivated differently, everyone learns differently, and emotional intelligence is truly identifying how people think, how people learn, how people act, and honoring that we were all different. Now I'm paraphrasing that. There's novels upon novels about emotional intelligence. I'm kind of giving you the cliff notes here.
But if you've ever been described as a narcissistic leader and you don't have respect of people on your team, you're struggling to get them to see your vision, self-awareness, and check in on your emotional intelligence. Are you truly understanding how your actions are affecting your team?
If you were going through a merger and acquisition and you have to bring a team through change, you have to understand how you show up is going to affect everybody else, which kind of leads me into the next one, which is energy management. If you go into the office every day as Eeyore, you're not gonna have a team of tiggers. You are going to have a team of Eeyores. If you are going into a situation and your team feels that you're incredibly stressed,
Cindy Donaldson (11:28.585)
they will adopt that stress level. Again, great leaders inspire. Great leaders inspire. And your job as a leader is to give a safe place of emotional and psychological safety and let your team know that you've got their back. So if you're going through change, you need to be able to say and be honest and say, hey, I know this is gonna be hard for some of you.
And I know some of you are really gonna struggle. My door is opened. I'm gonna help you through it. We've got this and you need to be optimistic and positive. And if you're not optimistic and positive about it, then that's a conversation that you have with upper leadership. You need to make sure that if you're a middle manager that you're aligned with upper leadership. If not, then that might be a sign that it's time to find a new job.
If you're the CEO and you are leading people through a massive change, your energy here is critical. You have to be inspiring. You have to be, you are leading your troops into battle. They need to know it's going to be okay on the other side and they need to make sure on the alignment, which is our next thing.
Leading from the inside out means that your inner mission, vision, and values aligns with the greater purpose of your team, the greater purpose of people above you. That alignment is critical. You cannot fake this. You can't authenticity. You can't fake alignment because people will sense that human beings are actually quite smart and quite intuitive.
And we've all been around people who have said things that didn't really align. And what I mean by that is you have to say what you mean, mean what you say and act accordingly because actions trump words. Actions always trump words. Do what you say you're going to do. And, and just, if you say you're going to do something, you got to show up and do it. So don't tell somebody on your team that you're going one way.
Cindy Donaldson (13:49.818)
and then you go another way. Like that's not how it works. You have to be authentic, which is the next one.
you have to show up as the true authentic you. And that means, even though, yes, your job is to inspire, if you don't know something, you have to say, don't know, but I'll check into it. And yes, we have to show up with great energy, but that doesn't mean that you can't be honest and say, yeah, this is gonna be tough for me too. But you know what? I know how to do hard things. I've done this before.
Is it all going to be unicorns and fairy dust? No, no. But if we team together, if we rally together, if we combine our forces, we will get there. And I am always going to be here to answer questions, to help you, because that is my job. So authenticity is so incredible. Be you. Show up as you. People don't like fakes. They don't like fakes.
Number six is clarity. People, especially employees, they want to know what's going on. They want to know what they have to do when they show up for work. They don't like wishy washy and most employees hate limbo. They want to know if there's a merger and acquisition happening, are they going to lose their job? And if they are, what does that look like? Clarity.
gray areas are like a death killer. Now, in some industries, like I work a lot in the banking industry and there's a lot of compliance. So sometimes what the board knows, the board may know a lot and hopefully they're sharing everything with the CEO, but that doesn't mean that everything the CEO knows has to be translated down to a frontline employee, like in a bank, a teller.
Cindy Donaldson (15:53.54)
Because the teller doesn't need to know that stuff. They don't need to know all the complexities. What they need to know is what their job entails. And a clear policy process and procedure. And yes, you need managers to manage to the process. That doesn't mean you're a micromanager, but great leaders have rules. And it goes back to that respect thing. A great leader, like in any job, hell, in my, I own three companies, right?
I do things that I don't like to do because I have to do them to get to where I want to go. And I'm choosing not to outsource some of this stuff for myself and I'm doing it myself. That doesn't mean that I love everything about it.
Now, if I were leading a big team, we would have policies, processes, procedures around that. And when I said, is what we're going to do, then the buck kind of stops there. That doesn't mean that as a great leader, you haven't assessed, you have your emotional intelligence head on, that you haven't assessed how those policies and processes and procedures will affect everybody on your team. And the more that you do it, the more you wear your EQ hat,
And the more that you really practice authenticity and the more that you are really conscious of that clarity, the more effective a leader you will be. And lastly, this maybe I should have made this number one, but it comes down to courageous action. And that's great leaders when they truly lead from the inside out, they do the hard thing, even if it's unpopular. They do the right thing, even when it's hard.
And that is great leaders are ethical.
Cindy Donaldson (17:44.344)
They don't have favorites in the company. They don't lie to employees. They don't do unethical shit.
So those seven tenants, and if anybody wants them, I have them actually in a PDF. I'm happy to email them out. My four tenants have been a great leader and my seven elements of leading from the inside out. But just to recap, and I actually have them written down because I'll go squirrely and forget, right? Which order I like them in. But I think I am gonna like regroup this and put courageous action at the top because doing the right thing even when it's hard is so important.
But one is self-awareness, two is emotional intelligence, three, energy management, four, alignment, five, authenticity, six, clarity, and then wrapping it up with courageous action. When you really adopt leading from the inside out, not only will your leadership number rise,
And again, there's no big formula for leadership numbers. I didn't invent the concept. My business coach, PK Smith did, because I asked him the same question. Well, how do you determine who has a higher leadership number than the other? He's like, if you're a great leader, which you are, Cindy, you'll just know. And that's right. I know. I can tell like when people walk into a room, their leadership number, I can tell after having a conversation. And it's on a scale of one to 10. And I don't think anybody's a 10 because there's always room for improvement. I give myself
about an eight, eight and a half. Because I really do believe through all of my years of doing this and the scar tissue and all the mistakes that I've made, and there have been a lot that I have learned truly how to lead from the inside out. And I'm very good at coaching others on how to do that. Because any kind of growth in our life starts with self-awareness. You have to understand what you want out of life.
Cindy Donaldson (19:48.834)
goes back to the bucket list challenge, know, and putting things on the list and stepping into your true authentic self, doing the things that make you happy. Japanese Ikigai, where you align your purpose, your mission, vision, and values with what you're good at and what the world needs. That intersection is where you're truly going to be happy. So I hope this was helpful for you today. Again, if you want the list of those seven tenets and the four things that make a great leader where, you know,
and you're on this leadership journey to be a better person. I promise you, you will be a better leader if you follow it, but more importantly, you're gonna be a happier person. So have a great day, bye.
