95 How to Lead Yourself in a Confusing Culture Power Questions for Clarity Expectations and Excellence

Welcome to episode 95 of the Great Leader Great Mom podcast, where we trade in mom guild and burnout for courage, calm, and a whole lot more joy. I'm your host, Liz Jolly, engineer, turn life coach, mom of three, and founder of the School of Courage. Here are we Talk about leading at work and at home without losing your sanity, your sense of humor, or yourself. If you're ready to drop the guilt and grow your courage, you're in the right place. This episode is all about how to lead yourself in a confusing culture using the Power Question framework for clarity, expectations, and excellence. This really is all about when the goalposts keep moving in your office. The expectations are really fuzzy. It doesn't feel like there's any strategy at work. Your leaders change direction every week. And somehow you're the one sitting there thinking, I can never win here. Nothing seems to be enough. What are we doing? If that has lived inside your head recently, this one is for you. Let me paint a scene you might recognize. You walk into your one-on-one with your boss and you're feeling okay, like you've been doing some things. You've hit some deadlines you knew about. You picked up slack when someone left off and you've stayed late a couple nights more than you wanted to admit. So you sit down with your boss and he opens up your and he opens up his notebook and the first thing out of his mouth is Well, I'm really disappointed you didn't prioritize X. And X is the thing they mentioned once in passing. Like There was no email on this. There was nothing. Not in your goals. Not in the last week one-on-one. It was never framed as, hey, this really is a top priority. Let's shift. In that moment, the hair on the back of your neck may stand up. Your stomach feels awful. Your brain goes crazy. Of course I miss something again. They're never happy. Oh my gosh, they have no clear expectations. I should just quit. Maybe I'm just not cut out for this. What the heck is wrong with this culture This is what I mean by saying there's moving goalposts and not clear expectations. Nobody defined what good looks like. And now it feels like you're losing in a game you didn't even know the rules of. Today I want to give you the process so that You can have clarity from the beginning of what is expected of you, that it's clearly defined, and you can know when you're making progress towards that or moving away from it. The problem isn't because you're lazy or you weren't paying attention or you're not strategic. The problem is that success was never clearly defined here So you're trying to hit a target that only exists in someone else's head and you're trying to guess what that looks like. It's not your personal feeling. It's a clarity problem. This is where I love to rely on my own power question framework that came from hundreds of times and trying to come up with how to ask great questions and how to get to the most meaningful part of a problem, like the root of a problem. So I use the Power Question Framework in a lot of different ways, but today I want to tell you how to use it to clarify expectations when the culture is very confusing on where you're going. So here's the three questions. What does success actually look like? Number two, how will we know we've succeeded? And number three, what makes success tough right now and why? That's it. These three simple questions will help you stop guessing and start leading the expectation conversation instead of being run over by it. Let's walk through them. So here's question number one again. What does success look like? We start with you, not your boss. Grab a notebook and ask yourself, if I got to define success in this role for the next six to twelve months, what would that actually look like? Like if I'm nailing it, tell me what's happening Don't use corporate jargon like leverage and all these buzzwords. Use real language. Now think about what outcomes have I delivered? What do I own? How do I want to grow as a leader, as a person who's influencing others and driving performance? It may sound like I led two major projects from start to finish that delivered X result I own the relationship with the key stakeholders we have and they trust me to keep them informed. Or it could be I run our monthly review and decisions actually get made in the room, not in the meeting after the meeting. So right now, a lot of you are trying to hit a blurred moving target. The first question is you drawing your own target. So you have something real in front of you instead of this vague like just do more or leverage that information or deliver the thing. This is where question number two comes in. How will we know we've succeeded? This is where we take a deeper level and we say, if I'm doing this really well, what does that look like? Like how am I gonna know? How am I gonna measure it? So maybe it's, well, feature A is live by June, or repeated incidents on B are down by 50%, or I'm giving feedback to my team within 24 hours instead of stewing on it or even forgetting about it I'm running a cross-team meeting twice a month where we talk about clear owners and next steps. Now you're not just saying I'll work harder, but you're saying here's how success shows up in deliveries, behaviors, and actual measurable things. This is what you can then bring up in that one-on-one with your boss and say, here's how I'm defining success on this project. What do you think? Because probably they haven't actually thought about it. So this is your chance to give them a draft, if you will, and let them edit it, let them think about it and refine it just so you know what you can be doing to deliver And the next level in performance. Question number three, what makes success tough and then why? Now we get the honest friction part of all of it. What makes hitting this version of success tough? Right now. This isn't a chance to beat yourself up or blame or whine or complain. This is the chance to tell the truth. Examples could be, well, priorities change every week and nothing ever comes off my plate Or my written goals say one thing, but my manager's pet project says another. Maybe it's we add new top priority work, but we never reset the rest. Asking why a couple of times on each of these, you're gonna get past the blame and into the real actionable items. When you ask why is this hard It may be because I don't feel like I can push back. And then you ask why? Well, because I'm afraid it'll be used against me in my review. Now you're finally looking at what is actually in the way. And that's where you can take this into action. You can bring it into the conversation and say, here's how I've defined success. Tell me if this is matching in your mind what success looks like, or should it be different? Then you can have that hard conversation and know what the clear expectations are. You're not whining, you're not getting frustrated or complaining. You're driving alignment between your expectations and your boss's expectations. This is so powerful. So let's talk about the weekly whiplash version of this. Maybe you have a leader who comes back every meeting with a brand new top priority and your week gets blown up again and again. Nothing actually gets done. At the review time, the story may be, well, you weren't really seeing the big outcomes. You need to be more strategic. If you're not careful, that turns into I'm not strategic, I can't keep up, everyone else gets it, but I don't. What am I missing? Here's the reframe I want you to practice. Is this about your ability or am I standing in the middle of unclear expectations? A lot of times it's the expectations. Nothing has gone wrong. We just need to get you to articulate what you see as success and hear back from them about what their version of success looks like and have the conversation from there. When you're standing and swirling and muddy expectations feeling like you're drowning. The Power Question Framework helps you pull their confusion out of your identity and get it to where it belongs with clear expectations. I want to leave you with one more piece. If you wait for your company to hand you clear, fair, stable definition of excellence or what performance that's excellent looks like, you're gonna be waiting a long time. So here's your reflective question for this week. What does excellence mean to me right now in the job I'm in over the next three months? Even if the target gets moving out in front of you? Even if the target keeps moving? Use the same three questions Just for you. What does success look like for me in the season of my life and my career? How will I know I'm living towards that What makes getting to that tough right now and why? When you're clear with your own expectations, then you can give yourself feedback and you can know where you're going and what stands in the way to help you overcome and get to that goal You're no longer chasing some secret rubric your boss has in their head. You're leading yourself. So the next time someone throws a surprise priority at you and acts like you should have known Just remember, this is a clarity problem, not a worth problem, not a capability problem. And I know which question next to ask If this is your world right now and you're exhausted from feeling like nothing is enough, I have a workshop coming up on toxic culture and how to not lose yourself but come out strong and courageous and so grounded in all of it No matter who your boss is, no matter how the expectations keep changing, go to lizjolly. com forward slash toxic or check out the show notes. With that, I'll see you guys next time. Take care everybody.