The Leadership Gap

After 35 years of building businesses and leading teams, I’ve realized no one ever really taught me how to lead. In this episode, I unpack the three leadership gaps founders often carry without realizing it: the vision gap, feedback gap, and identity gap. I share how these blind spots can affect your team, your decisions, and your ability to grow into the leader your business needs.

I also walk through a few simple exercises to help you uncover where your own gaps may be hiding, because scaling a legacy business requires being willing to outgrow yourself on purpose. Every leader has gaps; growth comes from getting curious enough to find them. Tune in now, subscribe to the Found-HER newsletter, and share this episode with a business bestie who’s growing into her next level.

Links:
Hey Bestie, Sign Up for Our Found-Her Newsletter!
Website: https://found-her.ca
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimberley.hiebert
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberleyhiebert
Door Gurus: https://doorgurusfranchise.com

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Can I be honest with you about something I've never really said out loud? In 35 years of building businesses, leading teams, and running companies, nobody ever sat me down and taught me how to lead. Not once. No mentor pulled me aside. No one handed me a framework. No feedback landed. Well, some feedback landed on my desk, but typically it was always in response to what was wrong or what didn't land or what was missing. Here's the gap. I figured it out mostly alone. And for a long time, I thought that's just how it worked. I'm not sure it is, but I really think that in the realm of building business, being a founder, a CEO, nobody really teaches how to be a leader. I'm Kimberly Hebert Besties. This is the Found Her podcast. It is for founders like you who are doing the real thing. You're done guessing and you're ready to build something real. Today we're talking about the leadership gap. Not the kind that shows up in a performance review. That's what I'm mostly experienced in. Or a 360 assessment, but the kind that lives in the space between you and who you are now and as a leader and who your business needs you to become. And the very specific challenge of trying to close this gap when nobody is telling you it exists. Because most founders are leading in the dark and calling it confidence. Here's what my education, my leadership education actually looks like. And sometimes it is the courageous decision and then just managing the fall, not the fallout, but the the uh what happened, the action after. Getting it wrong, obviously, and then quietly adjusting, reading the room and trying again. These are the things that I kind of thought were leadership skills. You know, I grew up really understanding how to read a room. And then I trained in understanding humans in social work so that I could learn to read a room even better or read people even better. But then I would find myself, you know, where I would be losing team members, trying to figure out like what happened, where, what went wrong. Did I miss something? Um, was it something that I said, not said? Should I have said something? Sometimes, you know, after hard, hard days and running conversations back in my head, trying to figure out what a better version of me would have done. And I think for me, if I'm being truly honest, a lot of my leadership skills comes from the look back. Uh, and I'm getting a little bit tired of leading from the look back. I think that's super important. Don't get me wrong, but there needs to be more intentional focus around forward looking, not look back. Anyway, nobody was really, nobody has really given me feedback as a leader. I give it to myself because I'm like you, probably your worst critic, your harshest critic. And I had no idea if I asked the right questions because quite often the questions I ask myself are like, yeah, what what was it I lacked or what didn't I see? Maybe some other questions should have been, what did they need? What was I not seeing? And it's funny because when you look at my, I mean, I've been doing business and building teams for 35 years. I led through the popcorn years. I had 75 women working and selling popcorn, millions of dollars of popcorn. I led through social work, I had numerous leadership positions in there. Um, I went on, uh, I would take courses because you'd have to get kind of credits or whatever, ongoing credits. So I would take courses, not necessarily leadership per se, but more uh more motivational interviewing, how to build a team, things that are leadership-ish or leadership-esque, but not specifically how to become a better leader. Through franchising, I've been leading, building the door gurus from the ground up again, and all this leadership I have developed across all those chapters, it wasn't taught. It was accumulated slowly with painful lessons, and not just for me, for others on the other side. And like I said before, often in hindsight. And while there's also a dollar value also attached to these lessons, as we know in business, leadership, or pardon me, not leadership, lessons in business usually relate to the bottom line. And while trial and error and being, you know, getting things done in the messy middle and not waiting for perfect is absolutely still better than not doing anything. It is could because it is a real valid teacher. It's just like I said, it's just can be an extremely expensive one, both on the teams and the budget. And what I know now that I didn't know then is that there are gaps you cannot see from inside your own experience. So there are gaps that I cannot see, and there are gaps that you cannot see. Not because you're not paying attention, because you don't know what you don't know. And that's the conversation we're gonna have today. So I've spent a lot of time coaching founders, watching teams, reflecting on my own path, trying to name the gaps that most leaders don't know they have. And it's always easier looking outside, right? Looking at other people and seeing the gaps. And I keep coming back to three. Three gaps that almost every founder is carrying, that almost no one names out loud because no one's looking at you from the outside and handing you the list. Gap one, the vision gap. You know exactly where you're going. The vision is so clear to you, and you think about it constantly. You assume everyone around you can see it too. Now, I want to pause and kind of unpack this one because the vision gap is really important because you know, for me as a co-founder, I live in the vision every day. I live in the mission every day. My whole focus is to build the vision and bring people along. But my team works remotely, they're you know, they're working as well, but they're working in the business. And sometimes they can get disconnected from the vision. And I think everybody's still thinking of the vision, and they can be disconnected, so then we all can be slightly disconnected because it fits in fits, because it lives in my head and it's been communicated. You know, I try to communicate it as clearly as I can so that people can really start to embody. And I found that this was much easier when we were working in person, but we keep moving more to more and more remote as we become a leaner, more focused team. And so this is the area that for me right now, I will continue to lean into is where is the vision gap that I'm not seeing? Because my team is now working. Well, within the next two months, well, I don't know when this episode will air, but like within the next few months from the time of recording, my app my team is going to be working purely remote. And so this is the one area I think as remote leaders becomes a big gap is the vision gap. So remembering that your team cannot follow a direction that they can't see, and they won't tell you when they're lost. This is what the one that surprises me is that they won't tell you when they're lost. You'll just start to see the consequences of them being lost. You might see silent quitters, you might see disgruntledness, you might see uh a lack of connectedness, connectiveness, those kinds of things. This one is gap one, is where I'm currently going to be. Like I said, this is where I feel like I'm living. Gap two, the feedback gap. When you're the founder, the owner, the CEO, the person signing the checks, or the one everybody's looking to, you are the person least likely to receive honest feedback. And I had this conversation with one of my um entrepreneurial besties. Because people want to please us, you know, their team, they want to keep their job. They've learned what uh you react to well and what you don't. And so they've learned how to stay on the inside of that lane, which means you are making decisions every single day based on incomplete information. And when I was prepping for this episode and going through this again in a little more detail, this kind of stopped me a little bit more on my tracks and of like, am I getting really truly critical feedback from my team? Am I, but wait a minute, am I asking for it? Number one, have I created an environment that would allow for it? Number two. Um, and those are our questions uh that every leader should be asking themselves. Is the feedback that would really help you, is it actually reaching you? And have you created an environment that fosters that? I, you know, most of uh most of us as leaders like to think we have, uh because I feel like I'm an open book and I tell my team all the time that I prefer them to be honest and direct with me. And you can do that if you've listened to any of my content over the years, you know that's how I am. I deliver direct, open, and honest feedback in a way that's disrespectful or disrespectful. Oh my God, in a way that's respectful. Um, and I I appreciate that back. But nobody's gonna hand you the truth as the leader. You have to build the conditions for it to reach you. Like I said, are you building the culture and the connection, the connection with the team for when you do ask for the feedback? Um, and there's a book, Radical Radical Responsibility. I don't think that's the name of it. I can't find it, it's uh not with me right now. Radical Candor. Maybe it's that's it. Radical Candor. It's about taking being a radical, responsible leader, and it talks about this. So, this would be my question to you. I'm not an expert in any of these things, these are the things that I continue to evolve and work on. Um, and I am now at a place that I can I can appreciate maybe somebody teaching me. You see how I'm saying it even? I can appreciate somebody teaching me um in a constructive way what I need to hear versus what I want to hear. Gap three, the identity gap. This is the one that nobody talks about because it's uncomfortable. And this is the version of you that started this business, the scrappy, figure it out, where every hat version of you is not automatically the version your company needs at your next level. Scaling a business requires a different kind of leader than starting one. And most of us founders, knowing when we we can be stuck here, or we can, in my case, I wasn't stuck here. I I actually hired all the experts outside of my zone of genius, but now I'm back there. So sometimes on the founder journey and the growth and scaling journey, you go back and forth between knowing your lane and staying in your lane and hiring others to do theirs. Because as the version of your business continues to grow and you need to grow with it, there's also some financial decisions that need to be made. Is it better to everybody always like hire the expert, hire the expert? Yeah, but it can come at quite a considerable cost that you might not be able to afford in that space. Um, and so there is no one brush fits all when it comes to this decision. But scaling your business does require a different kind of leader than starting one. And making that transition on purpose, deciding to grow into who your business needs you to become, that's not something that happens by accident. That is very intentional. And I think of when I'm when I think of myself as a leader, this is where I find myself leaning into. It's this space specifically. I feel this place I'm good at. I am always reading and looking to expand my mindset, uh, my old operating systems, all of that kind of stuff so that I can be aware and when it's time, so I can change as the business changes. And I sometimes think that's leadership, but it's not the entire picture. You have to be willing to outgrow yourself intentionally, and that takes looking at who you are right now, honestly. So I'm gonna say that again. You have to be willing to outgrow yourself. So that's the question I'm asking you. Are you willing to outgrow yourself? So if nobody's going to hand you the feedback, and let's be honest, most of us are not gonna be suddenly um getting a mentor. Even a mentor can't give you the type of feedback because they're not in the business with you. So, how do you find the gap yourself, right? Here are some things that I wish I had um I had been given, things I figured out eventually, and some of them I'm still figuring out, like I said. And having a mentor will help you if they challenge you in these three gap areas that we just uh talked about the vision gap, the identity gap, and I already forgot the second one. Vision gap, vision, identity, and feedback. I think the feedback gap is the like some of my other podcasts. Um, here we're gonna figure this out a little bit together. These are things I figured out. Like I said, some of them I figured out on my own, some of them I'm still figuring out, but I think with every evolution of your business, you continue to figure it out. And these are things I now use with founders that I work with. Take a piece of paper, create three columns again. I like working in groups of three, it's very manageable. Most times I can remember two of the three, but at least, you know, three is the stretch. Any more than that, it gets too choppy. Column one. What do I think my team would say would be my greatest strength as a leader? What do I think my team would say is my biggest blind spot? Now, this I think would be so interesting. When did I actually last ask them? Let me say that again. When did I actually ask them? Have I ever? I have not. True transparency, I have not asked this question. So, like I just said, column one, okay, yes, I can do that. Column two, I don't know if I've really, you know, what would they say? But column three, I have never asked. The gap between what you think they'd say and what they actually say, that's the feedback gap in writing. So the pattern audit. Think back. So that's on, sorry. So on your first column, that's what you're doing. You're doing asking these three questions, okay? Column one, what do I think my team would say is my greatest strength? Column two, my blind spot, column three. When did I actually ask them? The second thing you're gonna do is the pattern audit. Think back over the last six months. Where did you lose someone? This one's tough. I I actually do this one a lot. Where did a team member, a client, or a partnership and not fully understand why? So when you think back and where you lost somebody, could be a good client, and you don't really fully understand why. Where did something not go the way you expected? And your instinct was to blame the external circumstances. Ooh, that one's spicy. It's always easy to blame the other person, thing, event, environment, whatever it is. Pick one of those moments and ask yourself honestly, what was my role in that outcome? Don't beat yourself up. It's not to beat yourself up, it's to find the data that's already there that you haven't asked, that's waiting for your acknowledgement. Your past is full of feedback. You were just never given it, you never asked for it. You have to be willing to ask and listen. And then the few this is the third part, the future self question. Write down three qualities. Sorry, write down the three qualities of the leader of your company who you're need. Oh my gosh, I'm so tongue-tied today, you guys. Write down the three qualities the leader of your company needs to have in two years. Now look at your calendar for last week, your meetings, your decisions, your conversations. Was the person in that calendar actively building those three qualities? Or were you just running the business? Okay, you guys, this one hits home for me. Because a lot of times uh my meetings and my calendar are about running the business. They're not they're not actively building the qualities that my business will need in a leader in two to three years. I've got some work to do. This identity gap shows up between who you're being now and who you're building yourself to become. I'm gonna say that again. This identity gap shows up between who you are now and who you're building yourself to become. I want you to say something to the founder who's been figuring this out alone. That's you, the founder who's figuring out alone. I want to say this to you. I see you. The late nights running conversations back in your head, the decisions you're second guessing with no one to debrief with, the version of leadership you've built entirely from instinct and observation and painful experience. That's real and it counts. I've been there, I am there, and it has made you more capable than you give yourself credit for. It has made me more capable than I give myself credit for. But capable and complete are not the same thing. Every leader has gaps. The ones who grow aren't the ones without them, they're the ones who get curious. This is my favorite word, guys, curious about where there are where their gaps are, and then decide to do something about it. You don't need someone to hand you the feedback you were never given. You can go looking for it yourself. That's what today is a starting point. If this landed, if you heard something today that made you go quiet for a second, two things. Subscribe so you don't miss any more episodes. Every week I send one framework, one founder, truth, and one thing you can actually use. No fluff. That's for the newsletter. Sorry. And if you know a founder who is struggling, send them this episode. That's how we close the gap together. Community. I'm Kimberly Hebert, and this is the Found Her podcast. I'll see you next week.