In this episode of Leadership is Feminine, Kris Plachy challenges leaders to take a hard look at their role—not just as decision-makers, but as the driving force behind the alignment, clarity, and culture of their organizations.

As the person at the helm, your leadership defines everything. Kris emphasizes that self-awareness isn’t optional—it’s the foundation of effective leadership. Leaders set the tone, and because so many people naturally defer to authority, it’s critical to understand the impact of your behavior, emotions, and decisions. Without that awareness, misalignment seeps in, leading to confusion, frustration, and blame.

She also asks a powerful question: Do the people who work for you know what it means to be a leader according to you? If leadership expectations aren’t clear, how can you expect your team to operate in alignment? A lack of clarity in leadership inevitably shows up in employee performance. Too often, leaders blame their teams for underperformance when the real issue lies in inconsistent direction and expectations.

This episode is a call to redefine leadership within your business. Kris invites you to get crystal clear on what leadership means—to you, to your managers, and to your entire organization. Because at the end of the day, everything comes back to leadership. And don’t forget—Sage’s Pathway training kicks off March 20th. For more information, visit www.thevisionary.ceo/sagepathway.

Key Takeaways From This Episode

1. The Leader’s Role in Setting the Tone: Why leadership isn’t just about being in charge, but about influencing and shaping the culture of your organization.

2. Self-Awareness as the Foundation of Leadership: How understanding your own impact, emotions, and behaviors is essential for leading effectively.

3. The Power of Clarity in Leadership: Why clearly defining leadership expectations is critical for team alignment and success.

4. The Consequences of Misalignment: How a lack of leadership consistency shows up in employee performance and overall business outcomes.

5. Leadership vs. Followership: Recognizing that many employees naturally defer to leaders, making self-awareness and accountability even more crucial.

6. Blame vs. Accountability: Why unclear expectations often lead to blaming employees for underperformance instead of addressing leadership gaps.

7. Defining Leadership for Your Team: The importance of explicitly communicating what leadership means in your business and ensuring your managers understand and embody it.

Contact Information and Recommended Resources

To get all the details and register for Sage's Pathway, visit www.thevisionary.ceo/sagepathway.

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Transcript

Kris Plachy:
Hey, hey, hey! Welcome to the Leadership is Feminine podcast. How are you? Hey, on the heels of last week where we were talking about Sage's Pathway, I wanted to bring a topic to this podcast that is related and it's kind of a bigger question podcast. Like, this might give you something to chew on for a little bit, but I think it's powerful. And whether you do Sages Pathway with me or not, I hope you will. I think that, that the conversations we're going to have during The Sage's Pathway training are going to be really powerful and probably not conversations that you have on a regular basis. So from that perspective, it'll be good for your brain and just energetically for you as a leader.

Kris Plachy:
But I do want to posit this question for you, and I want you to think about it this week. And if you haven't registered for Sage's Pathway, maybe this will be the question, you know, you want to really answer. You know, I know that you don't wake up in the morning and think-most of you don't anyway-how do I become a better leader? Right. I think most of us wake up thinking about what's the work I have to get done today? How do I make a difference in my business? How do we sell more, make more, earn more, improve what people are doing? You know, all those things.I do think about, though, leadership a lot. One of the questions that I ask regularly is, what does that even mean? What does it mean to be a leader? Now, I have a definition that I have outlined in Sage's Pathway that I will be teaching my point of view from, but it actually matters less what I think is a leader, and it matters more what you think is a leader. Because if you have people who work for you that you are expecting to lead, and that doesn't always mean managers, by the way. I just want to say that not all managers are leaders and not all leaders are managers.

Kris Plachy:
Okay? Those, the, you know, the word, I've said this on a previous podcast, came from sort of in the 1800s, leaders, when we really started seeing that word. And it was in sort of a way to describe people in that the birth of the Industrial revolution and people who were in management positions to make sure people did their jobs right. But now the word has been sort of expanded upon to mean someone who's in charge, someone other people follow. So leader has a lot of connotation to it.And I think from someone like me who's thought about this word and the meaning of this word for fricking 30 years, I have a lot to say about it. But I realize a lot of people don't really ever think about the word leader, which is fine, but if you are the leader, the head of your business, people are looking to you to be the leader, right? And if you have hired managers, the people who work for those managers are, have a level of expectation there about leadership. Now the manager may not. The manager just may be focused on the work they have to do and they're not thinking of themselves as a leader. So as the person who's running the entire thing, I think it's pretty important that you think about it. What does it mean to be in charge, to be the leader, to have the impact, the influence? What does it mean?

Kris Plachy:
See, I have a firmly held belief that if you're going to be someone who raises their hand and says, "Yes, I will go first. I will lead the way. I will set the vision. I'll set the course. we'll go this direction. I'm going to take responsibility for that." I believe, and this is just my belief, but it is the point of view that I teach from and I coach from, and that is that your priority has to be your own self awareness and you have to understand the impact you have on other people. Because so many people fall into followership, which means they do defer to leaders. It makes it even more critical that as leaders we have self possession of understanding of and take responsibility for our own behavior, our own emotions and our impact.So I imagine you can imagine what it might have been like to work for me. Because if a manager made a decision that didn't align with the values or caused issues or even heightened success like it didn't matter, my question to them has always been why? Why did you choose that? Why did you do that? Why did you take that action? Because I want them to understand themselves first. Because if they don't understand themselves, then they don't know why they did what they did. They'll blame it on someone else and they don't know why a they even achieved the success they achieved. They won't know how to replicate it. So our own self awareness is vital.

Kris Plachy:
So as you're listening to me and you're in a leadership position, what does that even mean? And if you have people who work for you that you would hope would make decisions either on your behalf or in your absence or aligned with you, do they know what it means to be a leader according to you? Does it matter? I think it does. Because I think you know for sure when There isn't alignment. You can feel it, right? Do you know why? Or do you just blame them for not doing it right even though they don't know what they were supposed to do? I don't know. But that's our typical response. When we don't have a clear idea of what we expect of people, then we just blame them for not performing, not doing it right. We blame them, and it tends to get really personal.

Kris Plachy:
We blame their personal characteristics, their behaviors, their judgment. We get very in the weeds on what we think about them rather than, oh, no. There was a lack of alignment because this is my expectation of a leader and this is theirs. So what does it mean to be a leader? Do you know? If I bumped into you on the street, could I tell it? Could you tell me? Could you tell your managers? Have you talked to them about it? Because there is no more important role in a business than the leadership.

Kris Plachy:
I was in a. I have a. We have a local Safeway here. That's. That's good. It was good. It was a good Safeway. I was excited about this Safeway. I'm going to say their name a lot. Safeway. Safeway. Safeway.

Kris Plachy:
We used to shop at a different Safeway. We stopped going to that Safeway because it went downhill so bad. It was terrible. So we got a new one. So we've been shopping there, and it's been lovely. It's a beautiful store. It's. It's lovely.

Kris Plachy:
But lately it hasn't been. Lately the lines have been really long. The service has been really, really poor. It just hasn't been the same. So I went into line the other day, and I was getting my, I was buying my groceries, and there were two people standing next to the aisle that I was in that both worked for Safeway. One was a baggage clerk and the other one was a cashier. They were both just standing there chatting while the woman was checking me out in the aisle right next to these other two people.

Kris Plachy:
And, And there was nobody else around, so I started bagging my groceries. Now it's Safeway. They usually bag your groceries. I don't mind bagging my groceries, but at this Safeway, they usually do. So these two just kept chatting. So I bagged my groceries, put them in my cart, and I said to the gal that rang me up, I said, "Do you guys have a new manager? Store manager?" And she said, "Oh, yeah, we just got a new. We just got a new lady." She said her name, and I looked at her and I said, "Oh, yeah, you can tell."

Kris Plachy:
And she looked at me and she knew. She, like, kind of silently agreed with me with her eyes, if you know what I'm saying. She knew. So here's what I'll tell you. Whoever that manager is, is not aligned with Safeway leadership. The problem is that I would bet hundreds of dollars is that there is not enough transparency and communication and observation and follow through from the Safeway leadership to this store manager. They're going to lose a lot of business because we have a lot of places we can go shop and I'll pay more money to have better service, quicker line times. All the things.

Kris Plachy:
You can always tell when there is a lack of alignment in leadership because it shows up in employee results. Always. Whenever you have a tit, a tat, or a frustration with a hotel desk clerk or your rental car desk clerk, or when you're at the gas station and it's not a great experience, or you're in a retail shop and it's not a great experience, you know what you have? You have a leadership problem. Now there's probably an employee that probably shouldn't work there anymore. But guess what? You don't have a clear definition of leadership. Then you have leaders who aren't doing what they're supposed to do. It's all the time. So I, I rarely am annoyed with, like, staff because it, as much as it's frustrating, it's an accountability issue, which is ultimately a leadership issue.

Kris Plachy:
So all of this is to say you could go out as an experiment today and go into all sorts of different shops and you will know just by the way that you feel when you walk in, if they have a solid leadership organization. Our local movie theater is a filthy mess. Terrible leadership. Right? I don't even want to go in there because I don't think it's ever cleaned. It's disgusting and it's huge. It's a big, big Regal. It's like foul.

Kris Plachy:
So leadership problem. People want to blame employees. No. But when we don't talk to managers about what the responsibility is about being a good leader, this is what we get. Because we don't even know what leadership means. We haven't defined it. We haven't defined clear expectations. We just assume we promote people in the managers and they know what to do. No, they don't.

Kris Plachy:
Because you know how you've struggled with having difficult conversations and holding people accountable and addressing Rhonda in accounting and dealing with someone's defensiveness and dealing with someone being late. You know how that's been hard for you and this is your company. Imagine if it's not yours. And no one's taught you how to do that. No one's taught you the guidelines. No one's showed you how to do that so that you don't feel so uncomfortable.

Kris Plachy:
So I know that you don't wake up and think about leadership every day. I totally get that. I'm not asking you to. But I am asking you to get really clear about what it means to be a leader in your business. If you want it to work, everything, with very limited exception comes back to leadership. It doesn't matter what the organization is. I can always tell if there's alignment in the leadership team, if there's clarity on the leadership team, if there's consistency in a leadership team simply by the way that the team, the team members show up. Run that through your own world and see what you think about it. All right. If you want more information about Sage's Pathway, go to thevisionary.CEO/SagePathway.

Kris Plachy:
You'll find it all there. We're going to start on March 20th. It's a two day live event. That's how it's going to work this time. You guys will get the recordings, if you participate. We're going to actually turn the recordings into sort of little snippets if you will. Right.

Kris Plachy:
Lessons. But the actual experience is two days live online. It's going to be a really, really powerful time. I'm super, super, super excited about it. So I hope you'll join us. Talk to you next time.