Welcome to the Leader’s Lens!

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

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We are currently in a Leader’s Lens newsletter series titled The Moment Determines the Mode, a leadership framework that helps us as mid-level leaders pause before reacting and choose the response a situation actually requires.

Here’s where we’ve been so far:

Share this with a fellow mid-level leader and let’s dive into Part 3!

There are leadership moments when the team doesn’t need another strategy session, project plan, or a deadline.

They don’t even need another solution.

Your team may need steadiness and this is not a new moment we’ve experienced.

We have sat in meeting before that starts on time, and miraculously everyone shows up! The facilitator gives the direction, agenda and action items, then people nod at the right moments.

Once that is all done, tasks get assigned.

Sounds like all the makings of a great meeting!

From the outside, everything appears to be moving related to the initiative, but something feels…off.

When we take inventory of what’s going on, we notice that the room is quieter than usual. The participants are careful with their words and the energy feels heavier than normal.

While it’s not something we desire, nobody is arguing… yet no one seems fully engaged either.

Under the surface there could be multiple factors for the vibe of the meeting to not be where it used to be:

That is the issue when we read the room at a surface level. We can see situation, even sit in the situation, and look like a productivity issue.

But the longer I’ve been in the mid-level leadership game, I have grown to learn that this is usually a steadiness issue.

Those are the moments when a leader has to stop asking, “How do we get more done?”

and begin asking, “What needs to be steadied before we keep moving?”

Throughout this series, I’ve been exploring leadership through the lens of training. Just like the body has different muscle groups, leadership requires different muscles depending on the moment.

In our last newsletter, we talked about the clarity muscle: the ability to reduce confusion, establish priorities, and help the team move forward when the work needs direction.

But what’s important to note is that every situation is different. And not every urgent situation is tactical. Some moments are urgent because something relational is happening beneath the surface.

Which requires a different muscle I’m calling the stabilizing muscle.

The stabilizing muscle is a leader’s ability to help people pause, breathe, name what is happening, and regain enough steadiness to move forward together.

It means noticing things many leaders accidentally overlook:

When those aspects entered into the room, the goal is to help people become steady enough to be honest, present, and productive again.

I want to return to athletics for a second. Back when I first started lifting, the main goal was to activated the “look good” muscles.

Don’t pretend like you don’t know what those are: the biceps with the curls, the chest with bench press, and the abs with the sit ups. I’ve done my fair share of focusing on those muscles to look good in the jersey (and for the summer time).

However, when playing a sport, I eventually learned that the legs are important too for power and speed. But beyond the abs, the focus was also needed with balancing and the core.

I’ve learned that when I work the muscles in my toros appropriately, it helps me transfer energy effectively, keeps me stable, and generate power in my athletic movements.

In other words, your core keeps you upright and allows you to absorb pressure without collapsing.

When I was a wide receiver, I couldn’t tiptoe down the sideline without balance.

When I was crossing people over as a basketball player (just kidding about the crossing over part), I learned that I couldn’t change directions well without stability.

While training as a triple jumper, if I wanted to jump further than 45 feet, my center needed to generate some power as well as balance.

All this to say, you can have incredible talent, but if your core is unstable, everything else becomes less effective.

Why can’t leadership be seen the same way?

Many organizations spend enormous energy strengthening processes, systems, and productivity. Those things matter for our team development.

But let’s see the people as our “core”.

When the emotional foundation of a team becomes unstable, everything built around it begins to wobble. The instability could generate poor communication. It could also hinder how decisions get made. I have seen it where collaboration amongst teams (internally and cross functional) get’s weak and trust becomes fragile.

And the result of an unstable core leads to performance issues.

This is why when we know how to read the room in our leadership, we can find that “pushing harder” or only focusing on the performance outcome when issues arise might not be the right move to make.

In this case, it could be looking at the core and how it could be strengthened.

I remember meeting one-on-one with one of my team members after a department meeting.

Normally, this employee is upbeat, conversational, and encouraging. But something felt off during this meeting

Their responses were short and sharp when I asked them my “famous” one-on-one questions.

If I had only looked at the words being spoken, I might have assumed they were simply frustrated or difficult. Instead, I remembered a leadership reframe when these moments:

That reframed changed my posture to simply asked how they were doing. Eventually they shared that they were reflecting on som recent feedback from another person in the organization.

The feedback wasn’t necessarily wrong, but the way it was delivered caused them to question their own performance. It stirred and flurried within them, and they carried that emotional weight into our meeting.

What looked like a communication issue was actually an emotional one. From my seat, had I immediately corrected their tone, I would have addressed the symptom. But instead we talked through what happened. Our one-on-one created a space where we were able to unpack the moment and provide context.

It gave us an opportunity to distinguish between someone’s preference and an actual performance concern.

By the end of the conversation, nothing about the workload had changed except our perspective. And our conversation was a chance for us to regain enough footing to move forward during the day.

As mid-level leaders, we often assume our responsibility is helping people complete tasks. But when we elevate our identity to Culture Builders our role becomes something deeper.

The work is important from a technical stand point. The people carrying the work are even more important.

What if a missed deadline could be about poor planning and exhaustion?

What if resistance isn’t rebellion but disappointment?

What if silence is agreement, uncertainty, or confusion?

We have to be careful not to rush straight toward one certain outcome, like productivity, without paying attention to those realities.

We may finish the project, but we’ll slowly lose the people along the way.

Our bodies are constantly interpreting whether a moment feels safe or threatening.

When people feel physically and emotionally regulated, they’re better able to think clearly, solve problems, receive feedback, collaborate, and make good decisions. When they feel overwhelmed, embarrassed, threatened, or chronically stressed, their energy shifts toward protection instead of contribution.

The goal of a Culture Builder isn’t to eliminate pressure. Healthy organizations need challenge, accountability, and difficult conversations.

The goal is to help people stay regulated enough to meet those challenges without becoming overwhelmed by them. People lead with their whole bodies. The mind is just one function. We have a whole nervous system that is actively working in how we lead, communicate and perform.

One of the biggest misconceptions about relational leadership is that it’s somehow less demanding. I’d argue the opposite is true.

Some leaders hear words like empathy, relationships, or emotional awareness and assume we’re talking about lowering expectations.

We’re not.

Stabilizing isn’t the opposite of accountability. In many situations, it’s what makes accountability possible.

Think about the moments when you’ve struggled to physically or emotionally regulate.

The moments when you’re flooded with stress over something outside your control. Or when you become defensive after receiving difficult feedback. Or when you’re mentally exhausted from making hundreds of decisions before the day is even over.

In those moments, you probably aren’t hearing direction as clearly as you normally would. Your attention narrows. Your patience shortens. Your ability to think creatively or receive coaching decreases.

If you’ve experienced that, the people you lead have too.

My default response is usually compliance. I’ll do what needs to be done, but I won’t bring my whole self to the work. I’ll keep moving while resentment quietly builds beneath the surface.

That’s my tendency.

Others respond differently. Either with withdrawal, defensiveness, buried in work, shut down in the work, or become quiet.

The moral of the story: Every person has a pattern. Part of becoming a Culture Builder is first recognizing your own patterns, then learning to recognize them in others. That awareness helps you lead the person, not just the task.

And don’t let those patterns go unnoticed! If so, you will see it in disengagement and side conversations with other staff members about your leadership.

If you are noticing your people not bringing their best thinking, they may no longer feel emotionally safe enough to do so.

What should a leader like you do? Push harder on the work? Brush it off like it is the team’s problem?

Or create the conditions where people can return to doing their best work?

Another part of my Leader’s Lens is to see the world and the work around me in frameworks. Today it shows up in a cycle for how there is a pattern for our leadership to bring stability in these situations.

First we Notice something that has shifted in the room. An odd moment has made us feel different, whether it’s a change of posture from a team member or a work effort that has caused everyone to revaluate their responses.

Then we Diagnose. After following through this series, you know that we have to flex our leadership differently based upon what the moment requires. We pause to pay attention to the cues of the situation before immediately responding to solve the problem.

From there, we Choose. Our awareness and understanding of what’s in our tool belt can give us the right next step needed for stabilization.

The work continues as we Lead. Now we get to step in with a better read of the moment and what mode we need to engage it with to get the best outcome for our team. This could be naming the tension, asking the team to process the event, or listening to understand the moment from their perspective (honestly, doing all these things is great for this aspect of the cycle).

After we Lead, we Reflect. This practice allows us to redefine our mental models, relationships, and efforts to see if they what went well, as well as what could be improved.

Finally, but not really finally, we Practice. Since every moment is an opportunity to Lead, we take the experience we just reflected on and put it in to action. The lessons we learn here can reinforce the type of leader we want to be for our teams.

I’ll admit this is the muscle I naturally overtrain because I don’t like rocking the boat.

I used to fear saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. So every time I would watch a leader, a coach, or anyone portraying those figures in a movie, I would study how they move.

I would mentally store away how they responded in difficult situations, hoping I could reproduce those words someday.

But back then, nobody told me that being a leader was not about performing the perfect response in the perfect moment.

That wake up call came after my mentor saw me frozen after not responding well in a difficult conversation.

He reminded me that I didn’t need to be perfect, but to be present. That principle carries tremendous weight for cultures we seek to build.

Your team isn’t asking you to have every answer. They’re asking whether you’ll stay with them while you figure it out together.

What if this week, you don’t worry about fixing every emotional challenge your team experiences, but just simply paid attention?

Reflect on recent meeting that felt tense.

Then ask yourself:

And if you are like me and need a quick script to get you going in the next meeting,

“Before we move forward, I want to pause and name what seems to be happening in the room.”

Just create the space. Show your team that you are paying attention to the climate in the room. This gives you permission to slow down the pace without abandoning the work.

It also gives you permission to practice honesty. And we all need a moment after a tense situation to be stable again.

Recognize those moments where steadiness is necessary. Your team needs a leader who notices the tension before it becomes conflict and slows the room down before pushing an agenda.

People do their best work when there’s enough trust, honesty, and steadiness to move forward together.

Your mid-level leadership can help steady the room back to effectiveness again.

This topic has become a very important leadership concept toward how I help build culture and leaders.

So much so, I finalized an diagnostic guide to help you Understand your Default Mode, Read the Moment, Define the Right Mode for the Moment, and Execute your leadership to meet the Moment.

Check out Leading the Moment - Diagnostic here.

The diagnostic is designed to help you read the moment and ask:

What kind of leadership does this situation require from me?

But I know that applying a framework to a real leadership situation can be harder than understanding it on paper.

That’s why I’m opening a few focused coaching spots for people who want help using the diagnostic with something they’re actually navigating right now.

This could be:

If this is still something you’re interested in, reply with “Coaching” and one sentence about the situation you’d want to work through.

I’ll follow up with the details from there.

In your corner,

— Ray

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