The Compassionate Leader School Podcast

"Their desk is right there with all of their things, and I don't know what to do."

That's what a supervisor said to me after one of their team members was killed in a car accident.

In this episode, I start close to home. On October 17, a fire at CFB Wainwright in Alberta killed four Canadian Armed Forces members and injured dozens more. My brother served in the Canadian Army and trained there. Then I take you back a number of years, to an organization with more than 100 employees that lost a colleague and had no plan for what came next. Who removes the belongings? Do we close for the funeral? Who reaches out to the family? And when the organization sent flowers to the funeral home, it reopened old wounds for staff who had never been acknowledged when they lost someone they loved.

Grief comes to every workplace, and almost none of them have a protocol for it. In my decades of working inside organizations of all sizes, I have yet to come across one. Leaders are as intrigued by the idea as they are afraid to approach it so when grief strikes, good, capable leaders freeze, and kindness gets handed out unevenly.

I also talk about the leader in the middle of it all, who is a human being first and grieving too, and why resilience has to be a practice you build long before you need it.

I share what my friend Margo Fordonski, a grief coach and educator, wishes every leader knew about grief at work, including how to plan for the second wave: the hardest weeks that often come a month or two later, when the memorial is over and everyone is expected to be back to normal.

In this episode:

• The supervisor, the desk, and the questions no one knew how to answer
• How one gesture of flowers comforted one group and reopened wounds for another
• What goes into a grief protocol, from naming a lead to honouring the person
• Why taking care of your team starts with taking care of yourself, and Margo Fordonski on the second wave of grief
• The conversation I lead with employees about what they'd want if they lost a loved one

This week's permission: You are allowed to talk about grief at work before it arrives. You are allowed to ask your team what they would want. And you are allowed to grieve as a human being, even when you're the one leading.

"Well, I appreciate that you appreciate me. I guess that's not exactly what I was looking for."

That's what my client heard after she'd spent the whole conversation encouraging a team member who came to her for help.

In this episode, I tell you about Joanne, who had a team member named Pauline come to her door with concerns and frustrations about a work project. Joanne read the moment as discouragement, so she did what felt kind. She told Pauline how hard she'd been working, that she'd seen the progress, and that she believed in her. Then she asked, "Was that helpful?" What she discovered was that Pauline wanted something else entirely. 

This episode looks at how we use one word, "feedback," for what is, in fact, three very different conversations. Appreciative feedback, evaluative feedback, and coaching feedback each do a different job. When a leader guesses which one someone needs, or blends two of them in the same breath, the result is what I call a cross-transaction. I talk about why capable leaders keep guessing and I talk about what it costs when a team member learns that coming to your door might be a waste of time.

I also share why appreciation and evaluation get muddled when you mix them, and why evaluation needs to come before coaching, with a few days in between.

In this episode:

• Joanne and Pauline, and the encouragement that missed the mark
• The three kinds of feedback, drawing on Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen's Thanks for the Feedback
• The four reasons leaders end up in a cross-transaction
• Why blending feedback leaves people asking, "I'm not sure what that was"
• Naming the kind of feedback before you give it, and teaching your team the language to ask for what they need

This week's permission: You are allowed to ask, "What kind of feedback would help most right now?" before you start talking. You are allowed to keep appreciation, evaluation, and coaching in separate conversations. And you are allowed to teach your team to tell you exactly what they need.

An annual review tells you how she's doing in her role. A stay interview tells you whether she still wants it.

Most of us only ever have the first conversation.

In this episode, I take you back to an October walk through Bannerman Park with Lorinda, my office manager. Six months earlier, in her performance review, she'd told me she was open to new challenges. I filed it away. Then she started to seem a little restless, and I'd just learned about something called a stay interview. All the way to the park, one thought kept running through my head that formed the question I was reluctant to ask.

This episode explores how we avoid asking our best people whether they still want to be here, because we're afraid of what they'll say. I talk about the most common reasons that sound so reasonable at the time. And I share Richard Finnegan's blunt point about why the exit interview always comes too late.

Then I turn it around. I tell you about Caleigh, a leader in the provincial government who wasn't sure she wanted to stay in her own role, and what happened when I asked her the same stay interview questions she'd been asking her team.

In this episode:

• The walk through Bannerman Park, and the question I was afraid to ask
• What a stay interview asks that an annual review never gets to
• The four common reasons women who lead avoid this conversation
• Running a stay interview on yourself when you're the one thinking about leaving
• What to do when you can't give someone what she's hungry for, and the reoffer question I asked myself about every person on my team

This week's permission: You are allowed to ask the question even when you're afraid of the answer. You are allowed to hear that someone wants more. And you are allowed to celebrate when a great person outgrows the role you gave her.

"I need grant reports 48 hours before the deadline."

That was the whole email. My client rewrote it six times and never sent it.

In this episode, I tell you about Patricia, who runs a 12-person advocacy organization and kept spending her nights rewriting grant reports that landed on her desk hours before they were due. She knew exactly what she needed to ask for but every time she typed the clear sentence, she added a cushion. "When you get a chance." "If it's not too much trouble." "No worries if that doesn't work." In three edits, she'd turned a requirement into a suggestion and written her coordinator a polite way out.

This episode names the pattern clearly. It's the softened request, where every apology, qualifier, and escape clause tells the other person the thing you need doesn't really matter. I talk about why so many capable women who lead do this, from the fear of sounding demanding to the belief that the only alternative to vague and nice is direct and mean. I also share the University of Waterloo research on why women apologize more often than men, and what it reveals about where the threshold for "sorry" sits.

Then I take one clean sentence apart and show you the five phrases that quietly undermine it, and what each one tells the person reading it.

In this episode:

• Patricia's email, and how a clear request disappears in three edits
• The four reasons capable leaders soften what they need
• The research on why "sorry" comes so easily for women
• The anatomy of a weak request: the five phrases, and what each one communicates
• The four-part request I use, and what I do in the five seconds before I hit send

This week's permission: You are allowed to ask for what you need without apologizing for needing it. You are allowed to put a real deadline on a real request. You are allowed to say "I need this by Friday" and stop talking.

"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.