Nobody Believes You: Why Being a Credible Leader is Important S5 EP10

In the final episode of Season 5, Jenni recaps on the eight practices of credible leadership: capable, empathetic, integrity, likeable, supportive, trustworthy, visionary, and vulnerable. 

Jenni provides definitions and highlights behaviours that may indicate deficiencies in each area, and also discusses how organisational support systems and a conscious mindset can bolster leadership credibility, urging leaders to integrate these practices consistently.

Episode Timestamps:

Credibility as a concept is the result of prioritising a number of what I believe are critical leadership skills over time. Without these, you will never become someone that people will believe and that can’t happen overnight. You have to prove and continue to prove and build that trust with your team and then you will become a leader worth following. – Jenni Field

Key Takeaways From This Episode:

Important Links & Mentions: 

Transcript for this podcast

Welcome to this episode of redefining comms with me jenny field. Today, I’m going to be sharing a bit of a summary around the eight practices of credible leadership the behaviours that you might see in yourself if you’re lacking one of these practices in your leadership and also a little bit about mindset and what that needs to be and how you need to get into the right mindset to be able to get to the place of credible leadership.

What are the eight practices?

So let’s start with a reminder of the eight practices they are:

Now, you might not be sure which of these are your strengths or your weaknesses and that’s why i’ve developed the credibility gap assessment tool so you can find out and there’s a link to that in the show notes it’s free to go through the assessment you get a pdf report at the end that tells you a little bit about which one you should focus on so it’s worth having a look if you’re not quite sure which one.

But I thought it could also be helpful to maybe explain some of the behaviours that you might be able to identify with in yourself that might suggest where you might be stronger or weaker. 

So, for example, if leaders aren’t capable, you might find yourself avoiding taking action. You might talk a lot and write a lot, but you might not actually be doing a lot. 

If you’re lacking empathy, you might confuse sympathy with empathy and focus on feeling sorry for people. You might also have an element of judgement of others linked to the fact that you don’t believe their lived experience. 

If you’re lacking integrity, you might say all of the right things but not actually follow through and do them. You might also have a large ego, which is very hard to identify in ourselves. 

If you’re lacking likability, then there might be a bit of a low emotional intelligence. There might be a lack of interest in building relationships with those that you lead. 

And if you lack supportive behaviours, then there might be a bit of a disregard for emotions, a bit more of a focus on tasks, and a lack of interest in team development. 

If trustworthy is possibly an issue, you might find yourself lying or covering things up, and you might be making people believe that something is true when it’s something else. So you might be really struggling with some of that, and that might be creating some inner turmoil as well. 

If there’s not the vision that visionary practice is missing, there might be a lack of strategic thinking and communication skills will be quite poor. 

And if there’s a lack of vulnerability, it might be that people are struggling to connect with you, or you’re kind of hiding things from them as well. You’re not able to connect and show your vulnerability. 

So those are some things to think about and explore as you reflect and think about which one of these practices might need a little bit of time. It might be more than one. It’s absolutely fine for there to be a few of those in there. It might be all of them, but what we’re looking at is being able to reflect and look at how we can build these to be a leader people will follow, to be a leader that people believe. 

Now, in my book I explore the things or the symptoms that you’ll see from those you lead when these things are missing, but to be a credible leader you need to be able to see some of these cracks really before they develop into holes. And while you might be missing some of these symptoms, there are certain things in your organisation that should exist to make sure that you are a leader that people will follow that these symptoms don’t happen. 

So, if you have got an employee experience strategy a strategic or influential internal communication function you’ve got leadership development programs and you’ve got line manager communication skills development then you shouldn’t see as many symptoms as organisations that don’t have these and that these are the things that i want you to think about when you’re looking at how can you build that credible leadership because the ecosystem around you as a leader has a role to play in that as well.

Does mindset have something to do with being a leader?

Now the final thing i want to touch on when it comes to becoming a leader people will follow is mindset because it’s always quite easy to spot the symptoms but it’s less easy to look at yourself as a leader and consider the role that you’re playing in creating them.

Now if i give you an example of Sandra who i was working with she was leading a sales team of around 300 people when we met we met online we had a chat over video call and we were chatting about communication culture organisational change and all sorts of things and as we were chatting we found a real shared interest in authors Matthew Saeed and Simon Sinek.

We discussed some of their books that we both read we talked about stories i shared some stories about meeting both of them actually at events in the UK at separate times and i left that conversation with Sandra feeling really confident that she knew what she was doing when it came to leadership. I really got a sense that she had understood it and knew what needed to happen I really got a sense that she knew about leadership and knew what needed to happen. 

But i was wrong and actually as we delve deeper into the organisation it became very clear that Sandra’s team were lost they didn’t trust her believe her or respect her and they didn’t know why they were doing what they were doing and they didn’t know the end goal and they didn’t really know the vision it was all a lot of people feeling very lost. 

Over time I’ve realised that Sandra isn’t alone in her love of leadership books and podcasts and thinking that she’s doing all of the right things when in fact she isn’t doing any of them and it’s a lot more common than you might think and it’s harder to fix because it’s all about ego and mindset

The only way you can change is if you’re clear about why you’re reading the book or listening to the podcast or listening to the audio book or watching the TED talk, but you have to be clear about why you’re doing that and the problem you’re trying to solve. If we’re reading things or consuming information just because we think it’s interesting, we’re not doing it with enough purpose.

So there has to be a combination of clarity, intention, and self-awareness to really make it stick. To enable that change, we have to understand where we are now, where we want to start, and then what’s happening around us. These are the sorts of things that help us get through to the subconscious about why we want to do something. It’s the incentives for the change. 

It’s only then that the mind will allow us to start doing things differently, but this does take time. It takes time, and space to think about these things and for some people it requires the support of a coach and some other supportive people around them to help get there.

But becoming credible is not a one-off process, it’s a whole matrix of habits and activities that create a new kind of leader and it’s a way of being in this world that requires practice, humility, patience and consistency. 

Credibility as a concept is the result of prioritising a number of what I believe are critical leadership skills over time. Without these you will never become someone that people will believe and that can’t happen overnight. You have to prove and continue to prove and build that trust with your team and then you will become a leader worth following.

As we’ve said throughout the season of the podcast you can’t just rely on one of the practices, you can’t just rely on likeability or just be supportive. It’s much more complicated than that. Being credible is about every practice and the impact that each one of those has around you. There might be times where you’ll need to dial up some more than others. For some people, being supportive will be more important than being capable. For others, being capable is much more important than being trustworthy. It’s about understanding those people and dialing up the right communications, the right examples, the right behaviours that demonstrate the practice for those that you’re leading. 

Because if we don’t do that, people will disengage and it’s going to be really hard to re-engage them. For any leader to become credible, we have to learn more about the impact of our behaviour, our communication style and our relationships that really allow others to say that we’re somebody worth following. Because for me, there isn’t a debate anymore, you know the leadership books will tell you about focusing on purpose or empathy or culture, but the truth is you have to be a leader people will follow. You have to be believed in order to do that, and you have to be credible in order to be believed in order for people to follow you.

Thank you for listening!

Thank you for listening to this episode and to the season. If you’ve tuned into all 10 episodes, don’t forget that this is season five, and in all the seasons before this one I delve into topics linked to leadership, organisational change, internal communication and employee experience. And each episode is kept to around that 15 minutes in length as well. 

If you want to find out more about the research that contributed to creating the eight practices, or you want to take our online Credibility Gap Assessment, or you want to find out more about the book, you can access all of that information in the link in the show notes. 

And if you aren’t already in my community, you can subscribe to my mailing list in there as well. Thank you again for listening. And I’ll see you again soon for season six.