Nobody Believes You: Being a Supportive Leader S5 EP6

In the sixth episode of Season 5, Jenni discusses the importance of being a supportive leader as a cornerstone of credible leadership. Jenni defines what it means to be supportive, and outlines the chaos that can occur when a leader isn’t supportive. 

She also shares the three crucial steps to build a supportive practice: creating a safe environment for learning and failure, setting clear expectations, and embodying a service-oriented mindset. Tune into the full episode to find out why leaders need to be encouraged to understand individual needs, foster psychological safety, and ensure transparent communication to enhance their leadership credibility.

Episode Timestamps:

Now, if you’re not supporting your team as a leader, then it means that people might just leave, you know, but they might also show up as experiencing a bit of burnout or feeling overwhelmed, and that will be impacting their well being. If they’re really trying to do all the things they need to do, but they don’t have that support, then that’s what you might start to see. – Jenni Field

Key Takeaways From This Episode:

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Transcript for this podcast

Welcome to this episode of redefining comms with me jenny field. Today, I’m going to be talking about why being a supportive leader is a big part of being a credible leader and in this episode I’ll share with you the definition of supportive the chaos that happens when you don’t have it which I’ll do with a bit of a story from some of my own work and then we’ll go into three things that you can do to build different aspects of showing that you are a supportive leader to those who follow you. 

So what does it mean to be supportive?

Well a leader who is supportive is one that creates the space for their employees to learn and grow a supportive leader is quite genuine in welcoming all of the questions contributions all of the challenges and they’re genuinely interested in the success of each individual in the team, they will create a safe space where people can fail or speak up or ask for help. 

They’re also quite humble. They’ll have humility in their style, leading in a way that serves others, that makes everyone feel that they belong, that feels part of something. Interestingly, in the research that I did, being supportive is one of the main things that people want from their leader. It came out as one of the top things that people wanted.

Now, if I give you an example from Jane, who I was working with, and she was three weeks into her new role at a manufacturing firm. We were doing some one-to-one consultancy and she told me my boss is micromanaging me and I’m not getting anything right. 

This was three weeks into her role, so it’s not a very long time, so I asked Jane just to expand a bit more on what was happening so we could start to see what was maybe driving some of those behaviours from their boss. 

And she went on to say that really she was just being told that she can’t email leaders in the business. Everything that she’s writing or creating is being really edited by her boss. She was being asked to create things that she didn’t know anything about, which meant that she was working weekends and long days. And even with all of that effort, she was being made to feel that things still weren’t right.

So understandably, Jane was very frustrated. You know, she was really trying her best in a new role. It was only three weeks in, and we were already starting to talk about whether or not this was the right place for her, which is a horrible feeling when you’re new into a role. 

But being supportive is one of those things that comes up again and again. It’s a really key part of being a credible leader. So what I wanted to look at was the level of support that Jane was getting and whether this leader maybe thought they were doing the right thing with the right level of support. Because what’s important to know about that supportive practice is that the level of support required by everyone is different. We all want to feel part of something. We want to feel that we belong. But we need to know how we work together, and that’s different for everybody. It’s establishing that relationship quite early on, and Jane and her boss hadn’t established that relationship, hadn’t had that conversation about what level of support was needed and what was required and what each person would need to make the first, you know, three weeks, but really 90 days, a success. 

What’s the chaos that happens if you’re not a supportive leader? 

Well, if you’re not supportive, people will simply reject you as their leader because it’s such a big part of being someone that people will follow. This supportive practice, it’s very much a non-negotiable for people. So that rejection is very clear. 

If we think about Jane, and we were talking about the interactions between her and her boss, Jane was already starting to reject them as their leader. They hadn’t had any of those conversations around the 90 days. Jane was feeling cross, claustrophobic, and that rejection was really starting to come through. Now if you’re not supporting your team as a leader, then it means that people might just leave you know, but they might also show up as experiencing a bit of burnout or feeling overwhelmed, and that will be impacting their well-being. If they’re really trying to do all the things they need to do but they don’t have that support, then that’s what you might start to see. 

You might also start to see that tasks aren’t being finished, people are taking a long time to complete things, working extra hours. They might also start to be more focused on tasks rather than relationships. You know, they might sort of really step back from that rejection and feel excluded, and therefore won’t be speaking up or won’t be doing any of those things.

So, there’s lots of different things to look out for. And as we start to talk about how you can build it, the importance of conversation, discussion, and understanding people on an individual level is really important.

How do we build a supportive practice? How do we show that?

One of the comments that came up a lot in my research was knowing they had my back. And that came up where people were starting to talk about what they wanted from someone or what they’d experienced from those that they had followed. And it sounds very simple, but actually supporting your team, publicly demonstrating your trust in them, all of those things goes a huge way to building that connection, almost that opposite of the rejection that we’re seeing if we’re not showing those things.

So these are the three things that I would look at if you’re looking to show the supportive element of the credibility. 

1. Make it safe. 

You want to create an environment where it’s okay to fail and people are able to learn, move forwards. You want to give them a space where you will catch them if they fall. But also giving them that space to learn as they’re going what you could look at is finding ways to discuss failures in team meetings so that they become a bit more normalized not about blame not about any of that but actually making sure that we’re discussing things and people are able to speak up and share that without feeling like anything bad is going to happen as a result. 

2. Being clear about expectations

So making sure that people know what you mean and what to expect this has very strong links to psychological safety making sure that those expectations are clear and what people need to support them so much of this comes back to your conversations and making sure that you’re discussing those things from an expectations perspective one of the things that I often come back to is one of brene brown’s examples if you’re not familiar with her work, she’s a researcher and author, has written lots of books about leadership, courage, vulnerability, all those sorts of things. 

But one of the things she talks about is explaining to people what done looks like. And that might be because you have an image in your head of a spreadsheet or a report or a certain way of doing things. Being clear about that with people that follow you is really important because then they will know what you’re expecting rather than you not articulating that. 

You don’t need to do it all the time. It can be a bit much if you’re doing it with everything, but it’s a really nice way of being clear about those expectations so people know what to expect and then.

3. Living to serve. 

So really, if you’re supporting your team, you’re showing people, you’re leading them by helping them be the best they can be, and you’re enabling them to do that. So you’re really showing them that you’re here for them. So how can you help them to get things done? How are you removing the blockers that might be coming in? How are you helping them achieve their goals? How are you focusing on them, their development, their growth? How are you showing that care and support that they’re looking for?

Being a supportive leader is ultimately about making the time for people. Now, that’s easy to say, and also if you’re leading a whole organisation of thousands of people that’s much harder to do in terms of those individual conversations. But you can lead your direct team in a supportive way, and that in turn will create a culture of a supportive element of credible leadership.

And that’s really important, we want to see that right from the top all the way through the organisation that people do feel safe that our leaders are demonstrating elements of humility and all of those things are important when it comes to being supportive. 

Thank you for listening!

Now, if you want to find out more about the research or take our online credibility gap assessment or find out more about the book you can access all of that information in the link in the show notes.

In the next episode we will be looking at the practice of trustworthy what it means to be trustworthy why it’s important when it comes to being a credible leader and also how to build it.

Thank you for listening and if you haven’t already please do join my community by subscribing to my mailing list all of the details are in the show notes