Kristiana Corona:
I want you to ask yourself, when was the last time my team challenged me on my leadership? If you struggle to find a moment where you can recall your team pushing back on you, you have a big problem. Ever feel like everyone else has leadership figured out and you're just making it up as you go? I've been there.
I spent two decades leading design and technology teams at Fortune 500 companies, and for years, I looked like I had everything pulled together on the outside, but on the inside, I felt burned out, overwhelmed, and unworthy of the title leader. Then a surprise encounter with executive coaching changed my life and dramatically improved my leadership style and my results.
Now I help others make that same shift in their leadership. This podcast is where we do the work, building the mindset, the coaching skills, and the confidence to lead with clarity and authenticity, and to finally feel worthy to lead from the inside out.
Hello and welcome back to the Worthy To Lead Podcast. I'm your host, Kristian Corona, and I'm so glad you decided to join us for today. We have an interesting podcast topic, and today, what we're talking about is your leadership ceiling. So you might be asking, what is a leadership ceiling? And how do I know if I'm hitting that ceiling?
So the ceiling that I'm talking about is the ceiling of human-centered leadership skills. And this shows up in things like you're experiencing a lot of friction on your team, and you're not quite sure why. Or maybe you're starting to have a lot of attrition. All of your best players are leaving, and you feel like there is this unspoken thing that's going on.
People are quietly quitting. Or maybe there's just general confusion. There's confusion about what is our mission, what are we even doing? What are the standards I need to abide by? And it's just been really hard to get people to perform at the level that you want them to. And unfortunately, the hard truth here is there's likely a cause and that causes you.
So when you think about your leadership, we think a lot about having certain skills, hard skills in leadership, right? But what I'm talking about today is sort of the behind the scenes. What are those soft skills? What are the things that are either making or breaking your leadership? And interestingly, the more you scale your business, so even if you're a solopreneur today, this still applies to you.
You always are having to work with other people, right, like stakeholders or partners or suppliers or customers. And inside of a corporation, you're always having to work with teams of larger and larger size. And the thing is, your leadership gaps will become more and more apparent as you scale.
So the things that used to work for you as a leader are not going to work for you anymore, especially when it comes to these people leadership skills. How do I know that? Because I have lived that truth myself. So when I was 26, when I was just four years into my professional career, I was given the opportunity to lead people.
Now, mind you, I was this naive 26-year-old person. I was a designer. I had never had any leadership training whatsoever, and I was supposed to come in and confidently build this team to be a global marketing organization. And I had people on my team who were so experienced, they were so good at their job, they were confident, they knew what to do, and all of a sudden they have this incompetent leader who's put over them, who is supposed to just solve the problems and know the roadmap and drive things forward.
So I was in way over my skis and I knew that, and I probably made every mistake in the book in getting through some of these hurdles from a leadership perspective. I had people crying in my office, and yes, sometimes it was about me and what I was doing.
So let me just tell you, if you feel unworthy as a leader and you feel like you just keep hitting these roadblocks. I hear you, and I have absolutely been there, and there is hope for you. You can develop these skills over time. You just have to know what to look for. So our conversation today is really going to be about how do we start uncovering what those blind spots are that are happening for you?
How do we create some mechanisms so that these things start to become a natural part of your DNA as a leader, that you are grounded and aware in what is actually happening on the ground and the impact that you're having as a leader, and then how do you use that? To start unlocking your next level of leadership, whether that is growing your business and growing your team, whether that is taking on a larger size team inside of a larger business, whatever that looks like.
These are going to be universal skills that are going to be things that you can unlock and use today. So first, I wanna ground us in a little research. There was a recent study done in 2026 by the Talent Smart Organization, and they looked at leaders who were planning their personal development for the year, and what they found was fairly shocking.
Less than 5% of the time, leaders' top three development goals for themselves were actually focused on things that the team had given them feedback on. So, I'll say that again. Less than 5% had their top three development goals for their own leadership aligned to things that their team cared about that were impacting their effectiveness in the role.
That is unfortunately, a big trend that leaders are often looking at how do I improve my presence in front of the board? How do I show up and pitch ideas? How do I think about, you know, time management and things like that? But the more you scale, the more it becomes about how do you relate to your teams?
How do you help your teams be successful? How do you empower them so that they're not order takers, they're innovators? How do you help them to become strategic? If you aren't investing in the skills that it takes to do that, eventually you're going to start seeing your business fail. And it may fail slowly.
It may be this constant unraveling on the edges. Maybe there's just more friction, or there's people who are leaving, right? But over time, the wheels are gonna come off the bus and you're gonna realize people don't believe in me as a leader. So let's not let that happen. There's also a cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger effect, where the less aware you are of your own limitations, the more confident you feel.
So if you're someone who's saying, I don't have problems with that, I'm great with people. I know exactly what my team needs, then there's a high likelihood that you are completely not in tune with your team. So take a close look and get vulnerable for a moment because I want you to ask yourself. When was the last time my team challenged me on my leadership?
And if you struggle to find a moment where you can recall your team pushing back on you, you have a big problem. And that problem is people are showing up to be compliant, to be order takers. They're not showing up as the people you need them to be to drive your business forward. You do not want an organization of compliant robots.
What you want is strategic thinkers, innovators, people who are gonna challenge the status quo, people who are going to challenge you now. That being said, I have a story that I wanna share about a couple of different leaders that had dramatically different results in a large environment like Amazon.
Both of these leaders had excellent track records. They had both come up and been developed into leaders of very large teams. They both had over a thousand people each. One leader had started in an entrepreneurial journey, and so was used to going fast, breaking things, ideating. He had brilliant ideas.
The other had grown up in a little bit more of a structured environment as an individual contributor, but they had done a really good job of, you know, learning, failing, learning from that experience, trying again, building their leadership from the ground up, using a constant feedback loop. So the first leader, who is very innovative, did not change their leadership style as they scaled.
So what did that look like? That looked like control from the top down. They needed to approve every single decision. They needed to pre-review before the review, before the presentation; they wanted to be the one who was coming up with the innovative ideas, and if they didn't like an idea, they would squash it.
Eventually, what happened was their entire organization was trained to believe that they needed to please this leader. The only way through to get their work done was to please this leader, and so everything was done in the service of pleasing them. So they wouldn't bring ideas that were controversial. They wouldn't challenge the status quo.
This leader always talked first. They always said what they thought, and then everyone else nodded along and agreed. And what happened was not only did that squash innovation, people got very disengaged. You had highly effective, very talented people coming into the organization. Within a year, they were completely burned out.
They had highly talented individuals who would come in and within a year be completely burned out, disengaged, and leave. So the attrition rates became this revolving door in the organization costing Amazon hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost productivity, and the folks who were actually staying and putting up with that type of leadership.
They had to jump through so many hoops to report and to share feedback, to report on status and how it was going, and constant oversight that they wasted all of their precious time during the day doing reporting and oversight instead of innovating for the customer. And so at the end of the day, the organization felt fractured, disengaged, discontented, and there was a lot of quiet quitting.
Now contrast that with leader B. So leader B had a little bit less of an ostentatious beginning, and they kind of worked their way up, and they made some mistakes, and they learned from those mistakes, but that feedback loop that they implemented as they grew was a very, very critical part of their success.
So they were always listening. They were always curious. They allowed other people to share their ideas. First, they would withhold judgment. They would ask questions, even if they didn't understand it or agree with it, they would let that person make their case. They gave clear ownership rights, clear decision-making, criteria, and they showed up to empower others.
There was this feeling of constant innovation and constant improvement in themselves, so the environment that they created for others was safe for them to ideate. It was safe for them to move forward and to try things that might fail. And what happened was this created a culture where people felt like they could speak up, they could challenge, they could submit their ideas, even if it wasn't a good idea.
And this leader was beloved because of it. There were people who left the organization they were in and came over to her organization at Amazon just to learn from her, just to hear her vision and her strategy, just to be a part of it, just to, you know, be able to share something and have her respond because they felt recognized and they felt important.
And because of that, the organization was able to release some of the most innovative solutions that they've had, and that really speaks volumes. So if you have leadership that is stuck from a certain old behavior or a certain level of team, and you have not implemented this feedback mechanism, that is gonna be something that we really talk about next in driving your success.
I wanna share a piece of research here, which I think is really important. So you might argue, okay, great. These are soft skills. I know what soft skills are. I know that I need to listen. I know I need to, you know, invite other people to speak first. Okay. Okay. There's a little bit more depth to it. So Google did a really fascinating study called Project Aristotle.
And Project Aristotle was really about how do we identify the key factors of high-performing teams. So they looked at many, many different dimensions, and you might think, okay, the thing that creates high performing teams is probably gonna be their IQ, their talent, their overall experience, you know, how long they've been at this company.
All of those factors. But it was surprisingly not any of those things. The biggest determining factor in a high-performing team was that the leader created psychological safety. And what does psychological safety look like? It says, I can speak up without being punished. I can admit my mistakes without embarrassment.
I can challenge without retribution, and I can ask for help without looking weak. You see, psychological safety starts with the leader. And when you don't do that, when you shut down, dissent. When you lash out, when people criticize or give you feedback, if you react defensively, the safety on your team collapses.
And the next thing that happens is your team itself starts to collapse. People will leave, people will be discontent. You will not get their best effort. And so thinking about. Being aware of, here are the blind spots that I have. Maybe you don't know what your blind spots are, but if your team has not challenged you recently, I would ask myself, why is that?
Is that because I'm not asking for the feedback? Is that because they think I'm defensive, that I don't wanna hear it? So I would invite you to reflect on that a little bit more. Think about how can I start to shift my behavior to really show up and show people that they have psychological safety around me?
So let's talk about some practical ways that you can start to do that. I mentioned allowing other people to speak first in the meeting, and I think that's a really, really critical one. I think inviting other people to challenge you and asking, what am I missing? Here's my thought, but what am I missing?
Help me find my blind spots here. That shows a lot of self-confidence, vulnerability and humility to have a leader say things like that, and people will respect you for it. And then as you think about systematizing this, right? Like, we don't want this to feel random. We don't want this just to be a one-off.
Like once a year, I ask my team, how am I doing on my leadership? You want this to be a regular rhythm where you work continuously hearing from the field, this is what works, this is what doesn't. So I would invite you to create a mechanism or a feedback loop where you can do this regularly, ideally at least once a month.
You can create a survey. You can do it as an in-person conversation, but the focus here would be four different questions. The first question is, what's working well about my leadership that I should continue? The second one is, what are some of the pain points or the friction that is being created because of my leadership?
The third one is, if I could change one behavior that would significantly improve your experience working here, what would that be? The fourth one is. What am I not seeing that I need to see? So think about this in terms of. Allowing people to share anything, to share freely. You don't want this to be a performance exercise.
You want this to be a collection mechanism for you to truly understand how things are going. And it may feel awkward at first. It may not be something your team is comfortable doing, especially if you've never done it before. But over time, that trust will emerge, and you'll start to hear things that were not being said before, and the team is gonna start bringing you ideas on how to solve things.
So let's say you do this. The most important thing here is the follow [00:16:45] up. So if you do this and you do not follow up and no behaviors change, it's gonna have the reverse effect, right? People are not going to trust you. They're not gonna feel like you care. So we don't wanna turn this into a vacuum. You ask for that feedback.
You come back a month later and you share and you say, okay, this is what I heard. These are some of the things about my leadership behaviors that you would like me to work on, and if there's anything you're confused about that is when you ask for clarity, not in a way that makes people feel uncomfortable, like they're being attacked, but with curiosity and openness, what does that actually look like when I communicate that more effectively?
What would it look like if I had a clear vision and I shared that with you? How could I better connect the dots? What are some ways that you guys can think of that I could do that? Like this becomes a really nice dialogue around how could we solve this problem together? And then at the end of that, you wanna commit to taking action.
So you wanna pick a couple of meaningful things that you know the team will be able to see a difference from and start working on them. They don't have to be big things. They can be small things, but they need to be directly related to the feedback that you got from your team. And then a month later when you do this again, you follow up.
How did it go? What are you seeing? What has been the change? Was this effective? Are you seeing what you need to see from me? If not, how do we move that forward, and how do we try something different? So the more you role model this for your team. The more they're going to get comfortable receiving feedback from you because they know, oh, they can take it.
It's not a one-sided thing here. And people really respect that. So take a stab at doing this, and if you feel like you can't identify the key areas of human-centered leadership that you need to focus on, I would encourage you to take the free audit on our website. It is worthy to lead.co/audit. And this is going to give you a better picture and a more granular approach of the types of skills that you need to focus on.
And. Once you have that, it allows you to build some awareness and to ask better questions to your team so that you can truly identify what are some of those key levers that you're gonna have to work on at the next level. And if you find yourself struggling still, that's okay. Like, this is not easy stuff, and a lot of people never work on it, ever.
So you are the exception. You are the leader who's going to thrive, who's going to build amazing teams because you are choosing to focus on this, and it may at times be really hard, and you might get frustrated, and you might feel like, am I making any progress here? Is this even working? I would encourage you if that is you, if you feel stuck to think about bringing on a coach.
So a coach who focuses on executive development, who focuses on leadership, who does things like what I do in my business, where you create a safe space and you work through those sticky problems. Some of them might be beliefs that you've held onto for years, or negative self-talk that has been following you around, that is now bleeding into your team.
Whatever that looks like, if the problems are sticky, just know that you don't have to go through this alone. We are here to work through this together and to help you to unlock the type of leadership that you know is going to lead your team to success in the future. And I would say, you don't wanna wait on this.
You don't wanna wait until you have a big team. You don't wanna wait until you get that next promotion and you lead a team that's twice the size or until your business grows to a certain level. You are one of the few leaders who is going to take this seriously, who is going to work on your leadership skills, who's going to work on your listening and your psychological safety.
And you know what? This isn't just going to help your team now. This is going to help every business that you work on from now until the future, and you are going to be able to unlock results that you never thought possible for yourself. So give yourself the permission, the freedom, and the commitment to do this work and start today.
Thank you guys for tuning in. Thank you for listening. This is a topic I'm really passionate about, and I am here if you just wanna ask me any questions. So please reach out, DM me on LinkedIn, watch some of our podcast episodes, and please go take that free leadership assessment at worthytolead.co/audit.
If you wanna start thinking more about what your leadership ceilings are, what are some of those pain points, and how do you start to solve them? If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it with a couple of other leaders in your network who just need some encouragement and support right now.
Also, if you wanna continue to hear episodes and not miss out, I would encourage you to [email protected] slash subscribe so you never miss an episode. As always, keep showing up, keep doing the work that matters and keep leading like you're worthy to lead because you are. Bye for now.
