Are you feeling the tension between being the visionary leader your business needs and effectively managing your team? As the year comes to a close, do you find yourself reflecting on the ambitious goals you set—and wondering if you’re giving yourself enough grace for what you did achieve? In this episode of Leadership is Feminine, host Kris Plachy invites you to examine the critical balance between leadership and management.

Kris opens up the conversation with the striking statement: "A lot of people who start businesses are very good at leading because they're visionaries, they are motivating, they're inspiring... but maybe terrible at managing." And here’s the issue that she has seen many visionaries experience. She identifies that while many entrepreneurs possess the vision and motivation, they often miss out on the crucial organization and structure that managerial skills bring to the table.

Not neglecting those on the other end of the spectrum, Kris also brings to light the potential pitfalls of leaders who excel at managing but struggle to inspire and motivate their workforce. Often, she explains, these skilled managers tend to get too deep in the details and lose sight of the larger picture and purpose.

Kris notes, "You have to understand the dynamics of both. How do I leverage the hearts and minds and hands of other people to achieve the result I want? And how do I envision that result in a way that helps others be excited, be a part of it, and it becomes integral to the culture?"

As we wrap up the year, Kris challenges you to reflect on your own leadership and management skills, offering an invaluable perspective that just might lead to your breakthrough and take your business and your team to the next level.

Key Takeaways From This Episode

1. Performance and Growth: Understanding the annual growth, performance, and progression.

2. Distinction between Managing and Leading: And the need for a balance between the two.

3. Clarity on What the Entrepreneur Role Entails: Description of common gaps in leadership and management skills

4. Invitation for Listeners to Reflect on Their Skills and Their Goals.

5. Encouragement to Work on Personal Growth to Steer Business Growth.

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Transcript

Kris Plachy:
Well, hello, and welcome to Leadership Is Feminine. I'm Kris Plachy, and I'm thrilled that you're here. We are winding down for 2025. I can't believe this. This podcast will release on, let's see, the 9th of December. So we really have just four more Mondays for the month of December. And I know all of you who are leading your business and also leading a life, you are trying to finish up strong, I'm sure, on the goals that you've had and also starting to think about what comes next. What are we doing next year? What are you going to keep? What are you going to let go of? What do you want to save? What do you want to just put in the dump pile? What worked? What didn't? What truths do you need to tell yourself that you aren't that you need to?

Kris Plachy:
What needs to be acknowledged about this year that was amazing? And what needs to be acknowledged about this year that didn't work out so well? Right. Like, I think it's just a truth, as we run a business, that we have to look at things the way that they went, not the way that we wish they had been. I also would say that one of the things I've talked to a lot of my clients about recently is that we're really hard. I've noticed people are really, really hard on themselves when it comes to the goals they did or didn't achieve. You know, you set the standard for what those goals are. And in the case of the clients that I work with, everybody's overperforming where they were several years ago.

Kris Plachy:
There was a Covid bubble that seemed to happen for a lot of industries where people just kind of blew the doors off, and now they're sort of trying to have that same level of growth. And that may not be reasonable for your market, for the industry that you're in, for the products that you sell. Like, there's just so many ways and things that have to be factored in. And I think it's so much better to run a company based on what helps the company grow, not just the ambition that you have for it to be 20, 30% year over year. There's a lot of things we have to really look at when we're making business plans and focusing on what we're trying to achieve. I love a personal goal that's really ambitious. Why not, right? But the business and how we plan for the business to grow or not grow- some years are not growth years.

Kris Plachy:
They're fixing up years. They're efficiency years. They're "pulling in so that we can expand next year" years. And all of that is part of business. And if you've been running a business long enough, you know that that's true. Okay, so what I want to make sure is if we're rounding out this year and you didn't hit whatever that super ambitious goal was for yourself, and yet you're still meeting either the revenue that you had last year or slightly over, or it's double what it was two years ago. Can we give ourselves a little love yet? I think it's important. These are my thoughts.

Kris Plachy:
So as we think about and we wind down for the year, one of the things that I wanted to invite you to kind of consider is, as you know, I work with women on really how to lead. How to lead themselves so that they can lead others. But I think that there's some misnomers in people who run companies that I want to make some, I want to distinguish, because I was doing something the other day and I wrote this down. You know, how to be better at managing people so that you can lead them. I think there are some distinctions to make between managing people and leading people. A lot of people who start businesses are very good at leading because they're visionaries, they are motivating, they're inspiring, they have all these ideas, they take things forward, but maybe terrible at managing. And when a leader isn't good at managing, what we can end up with is a lot of chaos in the ranks, if you will, with the team, because there's not structure, there's not consistency, there are not clear expectations, there are not clear performance measures, there's not clear accountability process. That's what managing is. And as an entrepreneur, you do have to gain competency in managing.

Kris Plachy:
You don't have to be the expert, love. You don't have to be the one who manages everybody. In fact, I would highly discourage that. But you do have to understand, understand the foundations and the fundamentals of managing in order to build an organization that can sustain itself without you. And if you are finding that your culture and your team is, it feels a little chaotic, it could be because there's some gaps in how you manage or how it is managed. Right. And so I want to give you that perspective.

Kris Plachy:
Now, the opposite could be true. There are some entrepreneurs who are really good managers. They're very good at details, very good at process, very good at systems, very good at the- at how they want everything done and what they want done. They're very good at it. And so they they hire people and they're very involved in the what of people doing every day.

Kris Plachy:
Now that culture can feel rigid and restrictive if there isn't clear vision, if there's no leadership, if there's no motivation, if there's no inspiration, but that happens too. Sometimes, people who are entrepreneurs are so close to the weeds because that's their natural inclination. They're really good at it, they're very structured, they're very capable of moving all the pieces and parts. And so they work with people to do all that. But it feels quite restrictive, quite hovering, quite micromanage-y is where that word comes from.

Kris Plachy:
Right. And we don't build breathing space into the business where we have to ascend then into that leadership role. So we're not in the day to day, we're leading the business forward. We're strategically painting the picture of where we want to go. But there's a lot of people who have created companies, they don't know how to lead. They're great at managing, but they don't know how to lead. And the truth is, for as long as you serve as the founder, leader, CEO, which is chief executive, which is basically chief manager of the business, you have to have competency in both. You don't have to be an expert in both, but you have to have competence.

Kris Plachy:
You have to understand the dynamics of both. How do I leverage the hearts and minds and hands of other people to achieve the result I want? And how do I envision that result in a way that helps others be excited, be a part of it, and it becomes integral to the culture? So if you're listening to this and you run a business and you know that there's a gap here, we need to figure out which one is it first. And my experience has been that the majority of my clients who are entrepreneurs are pretty good at the vision part. They know what they want done, they're just not as good at the managing part. They just expect that they can hire people and tell them what they want it to look like and they'll just do it. And then everybody gets really upset when things don't look like we thought they were going to look, or they don't do what we thought they were going to do, or their idea of what it looks like is very different than mine. And that's when we know we have a management gap. We haven't set expectations well, we haven't made good agreements in terms of behaviors and values.

Kris Plachy:
We don't have clear roles. We probably don't have clear measures and we don't have clear feedback loop or accountability. Or we hire people and we're really hyper focused on what they do, but we never lift our head up and so they don't really understand what is this all about. So we lack engagement. They don't feel connected to a vision. The vision is never really even talked about. It's very micro. It's very focused on their day to day. We haven't considered the whole person. We haven't painted this picture of service or purpose or promise.

Kris Plachy:
And in this day and age where we are right now, what we're finding is people really want to be a part of something. They don't just want a job, but if their job is treated as just a job, then they lack that connection. And as a leader, we have to create that.So as you're doing your end of year assessing, I wanted to give you this brief podcast to think about that and just be reflective and honest with yourself about it. Which of those two do you think needs a little work? It's not bad. It's just that as we grow, as we develop, as our business develops, our growth is integral to all of it. How we grow influences how the business is able to grow. I know you know that.

Kris Plachy:
And so as you're reflecting, let's take a little stock on it. In the next podcast, I'm going to talk to you about your team and some things to think about for them as you're rounding out this year. So thanks for tuning in today, guys. Talk to you next time.