A leader's mood, words, and silence ripple through their entire organization. When leaders appear stressed, employees avoid them and mirror that negativity. Even inaction sends a message: tolerating a disruptive high performer or ignoring a problem tells the team what behavior is actually acceptable.
When I was going through those really dark, hard times, it was hard for me to show up as a positive leader. How do you stay up? One of the pillars is belief is transferable. Another pillar, to your point, is that leaders are aware of the echo of their voice. And that's a really important pillar because what tends to happen is if your team sees you as stressed out or negative, they're going to be afraid to bring anything to you. People will determine what type of day they're going to have based on the type of the day that the CEO or the manager is having, and that's how they're going to respond. So we always have to be aware of the echo of our voice. And Brian, the echo isn't necessarily just in the words that we speak. Sometimes the echo is, well, we've got this high performer, low culture fit that's super disruptive in our business, but we don't do anything about it because we need their revenue. Or the low performer, high culture fit, the sales rep that we love, but they can't even close a car door. And as we tolerate these things, what it does is, you know, the culture of a business is shaped by the lowest level of acceptable behavior. And so we as leaders have to understand the impact of our echo. And sometimes the echo isn't necessarily the spoken word, but it's the action that's not being taken as well.
