The Compassionate Leader School Podcast

"I think I messed up the formula in cell F14. Can you fix it for me, please?"

For three months, that email kept coming. Every time, I fixed it. It only took two minutes, and if I'm honest, it felt good.

In this episode, I tell you about my client Courtney and the spreadsheet I built to help her track her projections against her actuals. Several times a month she'd break a formula, and several times a month I'd rescue her. Then one morning, three emails landed before 10:00 am, and I felt a small flicker of annoyance. That flicker knew something I hadn't let myself see yet.

This episode names the pattern clearly: overfunctioning, Harriet Lerner's term for the person who moves in fast to advise, rescue, and fix. It looks like competence and feels like care. Underneath, it's a response to anxiety, and it has a partner. Every time one person does more, the other does a little less, and each move makes the next one more likely. I was training Courtney to need me, and I didn't see it.

I also talk about why this dance is so much harder to leave when you're a woman. The research shows women get no credit for helping at work and get penalized for declining. Men get credit for helping and no penalty for saying no. Then I bring in Edwin Friedman's differentiated leader and talk about how this approach to leadership is the antidote to over functioning.

In this episode:

• The spreadsheet emails, and the sentence from Courtney I almost took as a compliment
• What overfunctioning is, and why every fix makes the next request more likely
• The research on why stepping back costs women more than men
• The differentiated leader, and what it means to stay steady when your team's anxiety pulls at you
• What I do now when I feel the pull to fix, and the pushback to expect when I stop

This week's permission: You are allowed to let someone carry what's theirs. You are allowed to feel the pull to fix it and stay where you are. You are allowed to care deeply about your people and still hand the problem back.

To join the waitlist for the micro-training The First Boundary (The One That Changes Everything), click here.

You already know the answer.

You've just been telling yourself you don't, because "gathering more information" feels safer than admitting you made this decision months ago and haven't acted on it yet.

In this episode, I tell you about my client Elizabeth, who knew in month two that her new hire wasn't the right fit. Four months of performance plans, repeated coaching conversations, and quietly redoing his work every night followed anyway, because admitting what she already knew felt harder than the alternative.

This episode names a pattern I call "coaching theatre", the performance of coaching someone you've privately already given up on. Documenting conversations for a file "just in case." Hoping they'll quit so you don't have to be the one who decides. Having the same feedback conversation every few weeks and calling it progress. None of it is coaching. It's a leader avoiding a decision she's already made.

I also give you the test I use with every client who's stuck: one gut-check question that tells you, before your brain starts building a case for why you should feel differently, whether someone still deserves your coaching or whether you're just stalling the inevitable.

In this episode:

• Elizabeth's story, and the four months she spent coaching someone she'd already decided wasn't right
• What coaching theatre actually looks like, and the six behaviours that tell you you're performing instead of coaching
• The one gut-check question that cuts through months of second-guessing
• Two short lists that tell you whether you're still coaching or just stalling
• What I check for now before I let myself say "maybe with more time"

This week's permission: You are allowed to trust what you already know. You don't need more evidence, more patience, or one more improvement plan to confirm an answer you decided months ago. Stop performing the coaching and go have the real, direct and clear conversation.

Two people can hold the exact same title. Only one of them is quietly doing a second job no one put on the org chart.

You plan the birthday. You read the room before the meeting starts. You carry what someone told you in confidence and can't put back down.

None of that is in your job description yet, for women who lead, all of it is expected.

In this episode, I tell you about a management meeting where I was one of six women left at that table following a call to exit for some of the attendees. It's the first time I remember asking myself what I was saying yes to, just by staying in my seat.

This episode explores the emotional labour boundary, the line between the care you choose to give your team and the unpaid, unassigned work you've absorbed simply because you got there first. I also bring in my client Sarah, who spent the two hours after a coworker's birthday party quietly rewriting that coworker's failed client proposal instead of giving her the feedback she needed, because it felt cruel to correct someone on the day her team had just celebrated her.

The research backs up what both of us lived. Gallup's newest workplace data shows women in leadership reporting burnout at nearly double the rate of men, and the gap barely moves whether or not they have kids. Whatever's driving it is older than daycare pickups.

In this episode:

• The moment I first saw the second job I'd been running without ever signing up for it
• What Gallup's newest data says about the burnout gap between women and men in leadership, and why it isn't about parenting
• Sarah's story, and the birthday party that cost her two hours of unpaid rewriting
• The one question I now ask myself before I pick up work that was never mine to carry
• A simple test for knowing whether you've set a boundary, or just stopped caring out loud

This week's permission: You are allowed to care about your team without being their emotional processor. You are allowed to notice someone's struggling without owning the job of fixing how they feel. You are allowed to put the cake down.

And if you'd like to be on the waitlist for the upcoming micro training, "The First Boundary: The One That Changes Everything," here's the link: https://debbielawrence.ca/waitlist-boundary-course

For years, across different roles and different managers, I kept getting the same note. Not the same words every time, but close enough that I started to hear it before it was said.

"You're a perfectionist. You're intense. You'd go further if you loosened up a little."

I remember sitting with that last one the longest. Loosen up. It was stated as if the thing that was responsible for the stellar work I produced, the thing I was actually being paid for, was also the thing standing between me and being liked. 

Nobody ever told me to loosen up on the deliverables. It was just on myself and that distinction mattered a lot.

In this episode, I tell the story of how I learned that what I was receiving wasn't really feedback at all. It was a personality judgment presented as performance feedback. 

This is the pattern that shows up again and again for women in leadership: the qualities that help men look decisive and strong often get women labelled as difficult, abrasive, intense, or too much. The same behaviour that gets men promoted gets women told to soften, be more agreeable, and be easier to like.

The real problem is that leaders are using language that confuses a person's traits with a performance issue. Once you have the language for it, you can see it everywhere.

In this episode, I talk about:

• Why the feedback wasn't about my work
• The competence-likability bias and the social cost of being both capable and warm
• The difference between a trait and a behaviour, and why that distinction matters
• The five-part test I now use before I give or receive feedback
• The practical rewrite process that turns vague judgments into actionable guidance

I also walk through the research that makes this pattern impossible to dismiss. 

The most important distinction here is this: a trait is a label. A behaviour is something someone can actually do differently. A person can learn to change a behaviour. They cannot develop themselves out of the personality category someone else has assigned to them.

This is why I got serious about a new standard for feedback, which I share in this episode.

This week's permission: You are allowed to reject the version of feedback that asks you to shrink yourself to be easier to manage. Being effective is not the same thing as being easy. Being clear is not the same thing as being difficult. And the part of you that makes your work land is not a flaw to be corrected.

Somewhere in your business is a hundred-hour puzzle you built and are proud of. And you're the only one who's allowed to touch it because you're good at it and you keep telling yourself no one could complete it quite the way that you do. 

In this episode, I share the years I spent running a college registrar's office, building the entire class schedule myself, three times a year, close to a hundred hours a shot, convinced I was some kind of unicorn nobody else could replace. Then I tell you about the event that changed how I saw all of it. It's the choice I still carry.

This episode names the pattern clearly: what looks like competence is often just control wearing a more palatable outfit. The women who hold on longest to work they should hand off are typically the most capable people in the room, which is exactly what makes "nobody else can do this like I can" so easy to believe, even when you're the one saying it to yourself.

I also bring in my client Nicki, who ran her own version of this for eight years, sixteen hours a month across three retail stores. 

In this episode:

• The question I ask myself now that finally gets me to loosen my grip on something I'm holding too tightly
• Why "nobody can do it like I do" is almost always a control story 
• Nicki's inventory story, and the moment she admitted that letting go felt like operating in the dark 
• The math behind her sixteen hours a month, and what it added up to in working days at her peak with three stores
• A simple tool for deciding how much to hand off and to whom, so you're not stuck choosing between doing it all yourself and dropping it completely
• What I'd say to the version of me still sitting in that office that pivotal afternoon 

This week's permission: You are allowed to let something be done well by someone other than you. Being the only one who can do it isn't a compliment. It's a cost, and you're the one paying it.

People pleasers can't be trusted.

They're not dishonest on purpose. They're someone whose "yes" comes from the fear of disappointing you rather than saying "no".

In this episode, I share the story of a December I spent hand-painting a 4-foot Christmas trunk for my boss's sister, night after night, into the early hours of the morning, on top of one of the busiest stretches of our year. I said yes in about 30 seconds and resented every hour of it. And when the bow wasn't big enough, I painted a second one.

This episode names the pattern clearly, which is how saying yes when you mean no doesn't make you kind or helpful. It makes you unreliable, because the people around you can't trust an answer that was never a fully  explored decision. I get into why so many smart, capable women who lead default to yes this fast, and why flattery is one of the most effective delivery systems for an unreasonable request.

I also walk through a client's story: an invitation to speak on a panel, a friend doing the asking, and the opportunity-cost math that turned an automatic yes into an honest no, without losing the friendship.

In this episode:

• Why worry starts to feel like loyalty, and how that keeps people pleasing women who lead saying yes to things they don't want to do
• The sequence I use to turn an automatic yes into an actual decision
• The two questions I ask before committing to anything
• The client story of declining a friend's invitation to speak, and the exact words she used to say no without damaging the relationship
• What I do differently now when I feel the pull of flattery or the instinct to say yes too fast

This week's permission: You are allowed to say no without an essay of reasons attached to it. A clean no protects a relationship. A resentful yes can wreck it.

She lies down at 10 at night. At 1 in the morning she's still running scenarios.

The rollout. The training schedule. Who's going to quit over this. 

Every one of those is getting the same grip, the same attention, and the same tightness in her chest including the ones that were decided 1,200 kilometres away by people whose table she wasn't invited to join.

In this episode, I share the story of my client Juanita, a branch manager who found out by email that her company was rolling out a new software system, four years after the last rollout went badly enough that people still talk about it. She'd been asked for her input early in the process and then later she spent a week working a full-time second job in her head on a decision that had already been made.

This episode explores what is happening when something big lands on us and we don't sort it. Instead, we carry the parts we could move today with exactly the same grip as the parts that were never ours to even influence let alone control, so the things we can actually change end up with whatever energy is left over. And the leaders who do this most are rarely the avoidant ones. They're the most conscientious people on the team, which is what makes it so hard to catch in yourself.

I get into the three beliefs underneath it, all of which sound completely reasonable from the inside, and the exercise I walk clients through with a sheet of paper and 15 minutes. 

In this episode:

• Why worry starts to feel like loyalty, and what it costs to keep the fire going as proof that you still care
• The difference between preparing for something and rehearsing it on a loop at 1 a.m. when you can't sleep
• Why confusing having a voice with having a vote is the most expensive mistake of the three, and how it disguises itself as accountability
• The three circles exercise, what Epictetus and Stephen Covey each contributed to it, and the third circle I added
• The question I now ask myself out loud when I catch myself spun up about something

This week's permission: You are allowed to put it down. Being aware of something and feeding it are two different things, and your best two hours belong to the work that's in your control.

In this episode, I share the semester I spent chasing an instructor in my faculty for every report he owed me, the conversation I finally sat down and had with him over the break, and the four months afterward when I watched him slide right back into the pattern and said nothing. 

This episode is about how the conversation is one afternoon and holding the line is every day after it. When someone slips back and you stay quiet, rather than thinking you're not being generous with them, understand that you're teaching them that your standards have an expiry date. And most of the leaders doing this aren't avoidant by nature. They're the ones who care most about being fair, which is exactly what makes it so hard to see in yourself.

I get into the three reasons this happens, the ones that sound completely reasonable from the inside, and the accountability ladder I use now so that a missed standard has somewhere to go besides another round of the same conversation.

In this episode:

• Why the first slip after the conversation is the entire ballgame, and what your silence in that moment teaches the other person
• The difference between nagging and accountability, and why one comes from powerlessness and the other from a prior agreement
• What letting it slide costs you with your strong performers, long before it costs you anything with the person who missed the deadline
• The four-rung accountability ladder, with a script framework for each rung
• The one thing I now do during the conversation, while the person is still sitting in front of me

This week's permission: You are allowed to bring it up again. The conversation you had was the start of something, not the end of it, and following up on an agreement someone made with you is the job of being a leader.

Two people can look like the exact same kind of talent from the outside. One of them executes brilliantly. The other builds from nothing.

Promote the wrong one into the other's job, and you don't just lose a great performer. You could break them and the team around them.

In this episode, I share the story of a client, Carolyn, who did everything a good leader is supposed to do. She promoted from within. She picked the person everyone agreed was the obvious choice. Within months, she was watching a five-year superstar quietly come undone in a role that should have been a natural next step.

This episode names the pattern clearly: the difference between a tactician, who executes brilliantly inside a system someone else built, and a strategist, who builds the system in the first place. I talk about why smart, well-intentioned leaders keep making this exact misstep, the reasons that sound completely sensible in the moment, and what it actually costs when the best tactician on your team ends up drowning in a strategist's seat.

I also get into the rare case that trips up even careful leaders: the person who genuinely has both skillsets, and why that's almost never an even split.

In this episode:

• The real difference between a tactician and a strategist, and why intelligence isn't the same as either one
• Five reasons leaders keep promoting the wrong skillset into the wrong role, and why each one feels reasonable at the time
• What it actually costs a team when a builder's role gets handed to someone who was never built anything before
• The rare hybrid case, and why mistaking that person for a tactician will cost you them too
• The one question I ask before I recommend anyone move into a role that requires building something new

This week's permission: You don't owe a promotion to whoever is best at their current job. You owe the role the person who can actually do it.

Trying hard and producing results look like the same thing.

The problem is, they aren't. And rewarding the first when you need the second is how a leader can end up doing someone else's job for a year.

In this episode, I share the story of Nathan, one of our new hires everyone was excited about who tried hard, talked constantly about his plans, but never produced deliverable work. I kept fixing it myself instead of sending it back, for an entire year. Stating that effort ≠ results isn't some theory. It's a pattern I lived from the inside and eventually had to unlearn.

This episode names the pattern clearly: rewarding effort instead of results teaches your team that trying hard is the finish line, not the starting point, and it puts you on the hook for the gap they never learn to close.

I talk about the four reasons this feels reasonable in the moment and what it really costs.

In this episode:

• The story of the year I spent doing a new hire's job instead of holding him to a standard he was expected to meet 
• The four reasons that make rewarding effort over results feel completely reasonable, and why all four are wrong
• The five elements of fair leadership, and the one I was missing that let the pattern go on for a year
• What I do differently now
• The permission to stop treating effort as proof that the job got done

This week's permission: You are allowed to name the gap between effort and results without feeling unreasonable and demanding for doing it. Effort is not the finish line. Results are. Your job as a leader is to hold the standard, and let them meet it.