Anxiety specialist Caroline Cavanagh says courageous leaders step outside their comfort zone, share their failures openly, and treat mistakes as learning opportunities. Without senior leaders modeling authentic behavior, employees lose trust and commitment. She applies this to parenting, too: her children call her out when she doesn't live the courage and authenticity she asks of them.
You know, so they're the ones being brave, they're the ones stepping outside of their comfort zone and talking about it and failing and talking about it, because it's not failure, it's just learning how not to do it.
Yeah.
Do it a different way. So if you don't have that buy-in at the top of whatever the organization is, you're always going to get a disparity between just working at the lower levels because they're going to be looking up going, well, you're not doing that, so why should I?
Yeah.
And I think, you know, personally with, with the children that I've got, they're great at calling me out. And it's like, yeah, you're absolutely right. I learn as much from my children as they do from me. But most importantly, I come back to, am I being the sort of person that is the adult I want them to become too? Someone that just goes, yeah, the freedom, the courage, the authenticity. Am I being brave? Yeah. Am I recognizing my thoughts are now leading me? Let me swap that back around and pick up the reins myself. Don't do as I say, do as I do. Yeah, because that's so much more powerful.
And I love what you're saying there about being a role model. And obviously I know you and your family, and I know that you are a role model. I've seen that firsthand. And I think that's one of the things that we can encourage leaders and managers to do, and that again is, you know, what would make our ideal client is someone who's open to that, open to creating role models. You know, give us the, the opportunity to help your team with that because we're doing that from an uninvested point of view. We're not invested in your business in the same way that you are. We're invested in its success, but we're not ultimately invested in that. So let us help you to get your leaders becoming more of a role model for all the good reasons, and that will attract younger people into the business. And back to that point we're talking about, anxiety, will help people to ease their anxieties, at least in the workplace, and at least have a place where they can go to their managers and trust the conversations they're having.
