Women Leaders, Accountability and Self Worth

Kris Plachy: Hey, welcome! How are you? Let’s talk about kind of a heavy one today, but I think it’s an important one. We’re going to be talking about accountability, and I want to change the relationship you have in your mind with accountability. Let’s talk about how accountability and your self-worth go together, all right? Let’s go!

Welcome to the podcast! Welcome to Leadership Is Feminine. I am Kris Plachy, and I’m thrilled that you’re here, thank you for joining me. If you are tuning into this and it’s early fall 2022, I want to remind you that we are going to be hosting a live free five-day event we are calling “The Leadership is Feminine Formula,” and the intention of this five days is to tap into and help you see, and experience how you have all these already innate skills, wisdom, intuition, knowing as a woman that you can lead from.

You can use that feminine voice to be a very effective leader. I actually believe women are very, not just well suited, but are the leaders that we need now. The world is changing and what people want from their leaders is changing, and I think it’s time that we tell the truth about that.

And I want you to start, I want women to step into that version of themselves. So we’re going to do five free days, hour-long, if you can stay that, I hope you can join me the whole time. I’m going to teach and then I’m going to coach and I’m going to work with you live and it is my favorite thing to do.

I know you’ve heard me say this more times than probably ever, that there is no problem you could bring that I’m not going to know that I can help you solve, but I have to talk to you live to do it.

And so, I hope you’ll take advantage of this free opportunity to work together live.

<a name="_Hlk115996665"></a> Go to <a href="http://www.krisplachy.com/freepass">www.krisplachy.com/freepass</a> It’s just your name and email to register. We’ll give you the zoom link, you’ll get the calendar link, and you’ll get the reminders. And I’m really, really looking forward to this opportunity.

We’re also going to be inviting you once you join if you want to, you can join our How to CEO waitlist. We’re going to be offering some special opportunities for people who are on our waitlist, who joined our next How to CEO cohort, which starts on October 18th So if you know you’re ready to invest in yourself and do some work here and come out on the other end, feeling more confident, more resilient, more skilled, and really just under—honestly, more in your skin, like being who you are instead of this version of yourself that maybe you’ve had to try on to feel like you can achieve the success that way. So, I hope you’ll do it, I hope you’ll join me, <a href="http://www.krisplachy.com/freepass">www.krisplachy.com/freepass</a>.

So, let’s talk about “Accountability and Worthiness.” I’m in the middle of doing my CEO soul series for my clients. And after many years of a lot of things going on in the world, I just feel very called to speak to that part of each of you and each of my clients that I think has been quieted just due to the noise of the world and the noise of all of the demands of our lives and at the end of the day, I’m a life coach, and I have been called to do coaching since I was about 23 years old and I found out it was a thing.

It’s like the role and the work were created for me and the path just opened up in front of me of opportunities to pursue it, and I’m just so grateful that I’m alive at this time that I get to do this work. And I want to help you always know that what you seek, you have, but sometimes you need the elixir of an environment, a person, other thoughts, other people, right? Just to open things up for you that you haven’t seen before that have always been there, and one of those is accountability.

We hear that word thrown around a lot. “I need all my people accountable, you need all people accountable, holding people accountable is higher or wrong, right?” And it’s very rigid sounding and a lot of people have a real negative relationship with accountability. It feels punitive and consequential like something bad is going to happen if you hold people accountable.

And so, I’ve been talking about this a lot more with my clients and just sort of really holding space for, let’s just remember what accountability is. It’s about agreements, which I’ve talked about on this podcast. How I know that you’re struggling, how I know that these two things, accountability and self-worth are going together is because I hear it over and over and over again in the feedback we get from our listeners and from our clients.

And we just got one today. And one of the things that she says is, “I love what I do, but having a team is killing me. I love my clients, and I love how my clients do great things in the world, but she is suffering from absenteeism, overwhelm, and considering like a lot of my clients have been, and a lot of people have been like, is it just time for me to get out of this? Because people are so unreliable.

And yet, she also knows she needs help setting boundaries and she needs help holding people accountable, that’s the stage she’s in and that’s what all of us get to. It’s like we have to cross into almost like getting enough anger that we have to be like, “Okay, wait a minute, this is not working. Me trying to be nice, me trying to get people to do what they need to do, me trying to be understanding I’m the one who’s ending up with the short end of the stick and I’m paying these people. How is this happening?”

It doesn’t feel good. I know that when I say what I say, you might bristle, but the reason that we allow people to not fully meet the expectations that we have of them in your business is that we don’t believe we are worthy of it. It’s very simple, because I want you to think about where you do know you’re worthy, where you do never question it. Usually, it has something to do with other people.

So, when you see someone else in your life that you love being compromised, being hurt, being let down, you kick in, right? Because you don’t question their worthiness, you fight for that. “No, no, no, no, no, you’re not going to talk to my kid like that. You’re not going to talk to my spouse like that. You’re not going to talk to my mother like that. You’re not going to not follow through like that, right?” Like, we have this interesting gauge that we use and it’s usually pretty easy to see with the way that we respond when things happen to other people, not us.

So how we think about ourselves and what we are worthy of is at the core of our behavior when it comes to other people’s performance and that’s really what we’re talking about with accountability.

Accountability is not me making people do things. I cannot make anybody do anything that is not my business to make people do things unless I’m a power-hungry narcissist. That is not my jam. I’m going to invite you to a level of commitment, responsibility, and expectation.

You’re going to ultimately get to decide if you want to deliver at that level, that’s up to you, I don’t get to do that, you have to do that. But then what do I do if you do or don’t do it? That’s my business. And if I question my value, if I question my worth, I compromise. I blow it off. It’s okay. It’s not a problem. Maybe I’m afraid you’ll leave me. Maybe I’m afraid you’ll get so upset, you’ll just quit. Maybe I’m afraid you’ll think badly of me if I hold you accountable. Maybe I’m afraid you won’t like me.

So, all of that has to do with worthiness and value has nothing to do with the work. If you believed that what you have asked people to do is first of all, reasonable, and you’ve done so with clarity, you’ve confirmed understanding, and they still don’t follow through, that’s their responsibility, not yours.

Your responsibility is to say, “Hey, we made an agreement you didn’t follow through.” It’s not personal because you’re always worthy of love. You don’t have to do anything, you don’t have to become anything, and you don’t have to say anything. You by walking on this planet, are worthy of respect, and attention and you’re worthy of having people on your team who will deliver on your clearly established expectations.

And if that’s not happening, then we have to go into you, not them because I’ll be honest with you, I don’t care about them. I care about you. People who don’t meet commitments, in my mind, I don’t want you to waste your time with them. “But Kris, I don’t have anybody else.” Get over it, move along!

The more you tolerate people in your business who are inadequate, who do not deliver, who do not meet their expectations, the more you’re going to get more people like that. Have you noticed they hang out? And even the ones who were top performers, they start seeing So and So over there, getting away with it, they might try it too. You can’t operate that way. I know you know that. I know how miserable it can feel to have people constantly saying, “Oh yeah, I wish I could...Oh yeah.” Somebody said this to me a while ago. She said, “Yeah, I just didn’t get to that.” I’m like, what? Oh, okay.

I don’t work with her anymore. I’m okay with that, I don’t have to be mad at someone, I don’t not like her as a human, she’s lovely. But I want to work with people who want to overdeliver, who see the value in the work that we do, who love their job. And those people exist, I know they exist, I have to remind myself of this. I know you know that.

I love that I do this podcast because it’s a reminder to myself. These people are everywhere, and I’m very fortunate, I have some amazing people I work with, and I have learned through countless relationships that writing on the wall is usually pretty indicative, it doesn’t usually change much. But if you are questioning your worth, that’s where you go, “Oh, maybe I’m asking too much. Oh God, if I say anything, I’ll feel guilty.

Well, I mean, she does have all this going on in her life that is heartless of me to like...” Is it heartless? When does it go from being heartless for them to heartless to you? And when does that matter? Sure, someone says, “Hey, listen, my kid got sick today. I have an issue.” Absolutely, take care of it. The 17th time? No. The 7th time? Time for a new plan.

I totally understand having kid issues. I’ve raised three myself, but it’s interfering at this point with our ability to get the work done, I’d like you to let me know what your plan will be going forward. Because if it’s not a good fit here, I totally understand, we have to be honest with each other.

I had a client who just recently had this very honest conversation with someone, and it was great that nobody got mad. It was very mature. She’s like, “It was so great.” I’m like, ‘Yeah, it was a mature adult conversation.” This is what the expectation is. The employee said, “Yeah, I don’t think I can actually do that anymore.” And my client said, “Okay, then let’s figure out a plan to help you move along and I’ll find someone that can replace you.” It doesn’t have to be trauma.

When you take things so personally, it’s because you question your value. And I’ll say this again, I know that if you knew that what you do, if you believed it in your soul at the level that I would love to work with you to get to, you would not ever tolerate it. The discomfort of allowing your business to be poorly represented and supported would be much more of a driver than you avoiding the discomfort of a conversation.

But right now, the majority of you are avoiding a difficult conversation and allowing that to interfere with the operations of your gorgeous business. And to me, that’s not okay, you did not create this business to hire those people, whomever those people are that are on your team right now.

You created this business for those clients. You created this business to create a life that you want to live. You did not create this business for the four or five, 12 people that work for you right now, because I can assure you, three-quarters of them will not work for you in two and a half or three years. So, stop over-accommodating at the expense of your business. Stop it now!

And if you don’t know how to do that, that’s what I do, I will walk you through how to do that until you believe me, until you come to my calls and you watch other women and you’re like, “Oh, I was there once. I remember that.” Your confidence in yourself and you are knowing that you are worthy of a supportive, high-performing rockstar team is just a few tweaks away.

But if you keep compromising and believing that the needs of the business are not the priority, you will stay in this spin cycle and you will not hold people accountable you will blame them and be mad at them when ultimately, it’s really your business. We can handle this. Does that mean there might be some discomfort in terms of you might lose a couple of people? Yep. But do you know what you’re not doing? You’re not turning these people into rock stars. You know that, right? You’re not even going to turn them into C players.

We can’t run a company based on the hope of employees becoming different people. They will show you who they are and they do it quickly, that’s why I tell people within 90 days if someone’s going to work out. Very rarely do people after 90 days all of a sudden become weird.

Now after a couple of years, sometimes people get weird, their life changes, weird things happen and they skid off the rails. That can happen. But I do know that within a very short amount of time, within a very limited amount of time, you can know.

And if you believe in the value of what your business does and in the value of who you are and what you do, and you believe that all of us are worthy of surrounding ourselves with people who make and keep commitments, then you would be holding people accountable by holding yourself accountable to address what needs to be addressed and making the decisions that need to be made.

I hope this is helping you see that you have so much authority, where I think a lot of you are making yourselves helpless. You have so much more you can do literally to change what it feels like in your company for you every day.

This is an investment in yourself that will not just change how you run a company, but it will change how you run your life. Because what I know is that women who struggle with holding people accountable at work, struggle with holding people accountable in their life. I know that those boundary issues are showing up in other places in your life.

I know that those conversations that you have, you’re not having in other places in your life, for the same reasons. So, accountability seems like such a small little thing and people always want a script like, “How do I say this? How do I do this?”

And listen, we got the scripts. That’s not a problem. I’ll role-play with you all day but until you believe that you are worthy, that your business is worthy of exceptional, impeccability, impeccable high-performing people, you will continue to compromise and you will tolerate the very things that make you nuts and you don’t need to.

And I want to encourage you not to because the more of us as women who step into our voice and believe in our value and know how worthy we are, the more the world will change, and I believe that’s good news. We need a lot more women leading with confidence and grace.

So, if what we talk about here resonates for you, please come to my free live event, <a href="http://www.krisplachy.com/freepass">www.krisplachy.com/freepass</a>. I’m thinking Disneyland. Let’s do a fast pass. That’s more fun <a href="http://www.krisplachy.com/freepass">www.krisplachy.com/freepass</a>.

We’re going to have a great five days together. It’ll give you lots of good runways to explore some cool things. I’m going to share with you, my Leadership is the Feminine Formula, I’m going to give you some cool things to think about. We’re going to do live coaching, and it will also be a great way for you to sort of feel it out like, “Okay, I run a company, haven’t ever invested in my leadership and management and the structures that I have in place for my business. I’m going to explore this and see if this might jam, right?” So, thanks for tuning in today. I’ll talk to you again soon.

Hey, entrepreneur, you started that gorgeous business of yours to do some good in the world. You probably didn’t start your business to manage people, but here you are having to figure out how to manage people to get work done, and maybe it’s not going so well. So, head on over to <a href="http://www.krisplachy.com/howtoceo">www.krisplachy.com/howtoceo</a>, and let’s talk about how we can help you learn how to lead, manage, hire, fire, and all the things so that you can build a team that expands on your amazing dream.