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Welcome to the Leader’s Lens!

This issue offers a fresh perspective and actionable tips to enhance your leadership this week.

Send me an email and let me know how you plan on implementing this perspective shift in your leadership!

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Above The Frame: New Episode of the Leader’s Lens Show!

Within the Frame: Where most of your leadership energy goes

In a newsletter article a few issues ago, I asked a simple question:

Where does most of your leadership energy go right now?

Here’s the feedback from that poll

• Managing tactics, metrics, and deliverables — 40 votes

• Honestly… just trying to keep things from breaking — 21 votes

• Personal commitment (how I show up day-to-day) — 20 votes

• Translating values into team expectations — 17 votes

• Aligning with org priorities I didn’t create — 12 votes

First, than you to the 110 Leaders that responded! Then as we dissect the response, I found the message to be this:

Most of you are not spending your leadership energy on vision or culture initiatives. You’re spending it executing, stabilizing, and absorbing pressure. That doesn’t mean you don’t care about culture. It means you’re leading where accountability is loudest and consequences are real.

Honestly that is exactly where our middle management position and posture has placed us. It is the role we have been hired to do: run the play that has been given to us from the VP’s, Directors, and Executives above us related to organizational goals.

While I am not saying that we need to abandon that role, I do want us to expand on that position to incorporate the key element of designing organizational culture in the while we are focusing on GSD (Getting Sh*t Done).

What’s Actually Happening

If you’re a middle manager, this probably feels familiar:

• Deadlines don’t wait for alignment (Why would they? Dates don’t care about our feelings)

• Metrics don’t pause for reflection (Dashboards don’t care why the metric is red. It shows up that way)

• Culture conversations get crowded out by delivery (Again, execution doesn’t care about feelings).

So leadership becomes less about shaping and more about holding things together.

And if our mentality continues to compartmentalize culture from deliverables, we will further the divide the people on our team from the activities they produce.

For the on-the-go leader, any culture work goes out the window when they are buried in execution. The game becomes us figuring out:

• What gets prioritized when everything feels urgent

• What gets corrected quickly vs quietly ignored

• How pressure gets handled in meetings

• What “good enough” starts to mean over time

While we like to believe that the team experiences the organization whenever the top corporate executives sets strategy, that is far from the truth.

Your team doesn’t experience the organization directly. They experience you….especially under pressure.

What do they see and feel from the organization when they interact with you daily?

The Opportunity Hidden in the Poll Results

We will only see them as cogs in a wheel, making anything related to “team culture” feel like “extra work.”

Something else that stood out to me in the poll was that nearly as many of you still named personal commitment and values translation as meaningful places where your energy goes.

To me, it means that you know leadership is more than execution but you are just trying to practice it inside real constraints.

So instead of asking you to “add culture work,” I want to help you embed leadership into the work you’re already doing.

Here are three three things you can do this week that do not require an extra meeting on your calendar. These are not big initiatives. They are signal shifts that you want to see culture change as a part of your leadership lens.

1. Clarify One Priority Out Loud

At your next team touchpoint, answer this explicitly:

Then name one thing that is not the focus. After many times of sharing strategy and efforts that were confusing, I have found that if I just focused on being clear, I could reduce stress.

Stress reduction improves culture faster than motivation speeches ever will.

2. Translate One Value Into a Behavior

Pick one value your organization talks about a lot (trust, respect, accountability, equity).

Then define it behaviorally for your team:

• “This is how feedback works here.”

• “This is how we raise concerns.”

• “This is what’s not acceptable when things get tight.”

I noticed a team manager do this with his team during their huddles. The contextualizing of organizational values helped the team see how they are already living it out in their day-to-day, as well as identity how they could improve their behavior for values they haven’t displayed yet.

But this was a conversation that happened regularly, not just during performance reviews, corrective actions, or when the big boss is looking.

When you are ambiguous, you see more resentment. But if you are clear, you can improve understanding.

That leads to increased team engagement.

3. Notice What You Reinforce Under Pressure

For the next few days, pay attention to this question:

What do I respond to fastest when things are busy?

• Speed?

• Accuracy?

• Transparency?

• Helping each other?

• Hitting the number at all costs?

Whatever you reinforce, intentionally or not, becomes the culture.

You have to increase your awareness in leadership first; it will shift the behaviors of yourself and others.

A Question Worth Sitting With

If most of your leadership energy is going toward execution, ask yourself this:

You don’t need more authority to answer that question. You already have influence there.

But the courage to ask the question builds on your desire to integrate culture change through the activities you are currently doing.

Reflect on this:

Middle managers don’t need more posters, slogans, or culture initiatives.

They need:

• Fewer priorities

• Clearer signals

• Consistent follow-through

Leadership in the middle could be loud or visible, but it often doesn’t move the culture needle to the positive.

Most of our time is spent bearing the load of task related to keeping it all afloat. The refrain to see not only what we do, but how we do it and the impact it has on those around us affects the employee experience whether we know it or not.

Notice the signals. Make shifts within the areas you already operate in.

That matters more you think!

— Ray

Behind the Frame: “The Community Architect” Substack in development!

Because I am always finding different ways to share content, I decided to hop on to Substack to give more deeper reflections on leadership and belonging concepts that shape how we design the communities we lead (hopefully in an intentional way).

The Community Architect evaluates the systems and patterns that impact the full ecosystem of our social environment, all the while shifting us to lead well once we understand ourselves in that structure. Reflections of the patterns I’ve seen and researched, why its valuable for us to know, and perspective on what we could do about it.

This is a distinctive space than The Leader’s Lens.

Currently, I see Leader’s Lens giving you the tactics you need to show up as a better leader right now. It will acknowledge the place we are in right now, with the application to steer you to a better posture. You will continue to get the insights and tools that can be implemented in your next team huddle.

Both will continue to exist in parallel!

I am excited to produce content on Substack to get in my “research” bag and expand my skillset of long-form writing.

Who knows, it may produce some foundational publications as if I work in academia… (paging Professor Ray!)

Check it out here if you want to essays on the frameworks and systems that we are involved in, including how we can design them to reflect inclusive principles where every identity belongs and thrives.

Whenever you are ready, here are ways you can work with me:

• 🎤Speaking - As a Speaker and Facilitator, I will engage your team on how belonging and inclusivity can increase your team dynamics! ​Book Ray Now

• 🤝Coaching - As a Coach, I will help you enhance the power of inclusivity and empathy to be an effective leader through an equity lens! Book a Call Now

• 📘Consulting - As a Consultant, I will help strengthen your organizational culture to increase the employee experience and retention! Book a Consultation Now

P.S. - Thank you to those who have filled out the survey letting me know more about your leadership journey! I am excited to dive into the results over the next couple of weeks to provide you with resources and content that will support your leadership! If you haven’t filled it out yet, do so by clicking the link here!