📍 Welcome back to No Silver Spoons. I'm Sarah Beth Herman. Thank you so much for being here. We're getting incredibly close to the end of Season 5 and the end of our Human Side of Leadership summer series. After today, we have just one episode left in this series. Episode 140 will officially close the summer series and Season 5.

And then we're going to do something a little bit different as we open up Season 6 here at No Silver Spoons. Episode 141 will actually be our Season 6 introduction. I'm giving that entire episode to telling you where we're going next. I'm gonna tell you what Season 6 is all about, why we chose this direction, and what we're going to be talking about, what you can expect from me, and why I think the timing of this Season 6 here at No Silver Spoons matters so much as we move through the final part of 2026 and start looking toward 2027.

Then, with Episode 142, we're not easing into anything. We are diving right in, and I'm excited about that because Season 6 is gonna feel different for you, for me, for my entire team.  This summer, we've spent a lot of time looking inward. We've been talking about the human being behind the titles.

We've talked about relationships, trust, assumptions, emotional intelligence, integrity, accountability, culture, the mistakes we make, and the things that leadership teaches us about ourselves. Season 6 is going to take what we've learned here and start asking, "What are we going to do with it?"

We're entering the part of the year when businesses start looking at where they're gonna finish. Leaders start looking at numbers, goals, budgets, strategy, what worked, what didn't work, what needs to change before December 31st. And before long, we'll be talking about 2027 and everything we're supposedly going to do differently when the calendar changes Season six is gonna meet us right there.

But I'm saving the details for episode 141. First, we have two conversations left here, and today's might be one of the more uncomfortable ones. Because last week we talked about what happens when you keep trying to save people from the consequences of their own choices. I told you about hiring people I thought I could help, keeping people longer than I should have, hiring family, hiring people I had worked with at previous companies because I thought somehow they were gonna be working for me and that would be different, and eventually realizing that seeing someone's potential doesn't mean that they're going to choose that potential.

But there's another side to that conversation. Sometimes you aren't rescuing the wrong employee. Sometimes you've hired really good people, sometimes you've trained them, you've given them tools, you've built systems, and you're still having the same problems. And at some point, a leader has to become willing to ask a question that I don't think any of us particularly enjoy asking.

What if I'm the problem? Not what if I'm a terrible leader, that's not what I'm asking. And not what if everything is my fault? That's not useful either. I'm talking about something much more specific. What if there is something I am doing, I am allowing, I am communicating, avoiding, rewarding, tolerating, or creating that is contributing to the very problem I keep complaining about?

And I think that's a harder question because the higher you climb in leadership, the easier it becomes to find evidence that you're doing everything right. And there's some pretty fascinating research around this. Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich, she spent years studying self-awareness, including research involving thousands of people, and found something that should probably make every leader a little uncomfortable.

About 95% of people believe they are self-aware, while only about 10 to 15% actually meet the criteria for being self-aware Think about that. 95% of people believe they are self-aware, 10 to 15% actually meet that criteria for being self-aware. That is a gap that is tremendous. Almost everybody believes they understand themselves.

We believe we understand our motives. We believe we know how we come across to other people, and apparently most of us aren't nearly as good at it as we think we are.

Now, I don't hear that statistic and think, "Wow, everybody else really needs to become more self-aware", because that response would almost prove the point. I hear that and I think, " There's a pretty good chance I have blind spots too", and that's a very different way to approach leadership. Self-awareness isn't simply knowing what you intended to do.

It's becoming willing to understand how what you actually did was experienced by somebody . And I've thought about this a lot because I've been leading companies for a long time. There are people on my team who absolutely will tell me when they disagree with me, and I value that. I need it, and I almost crave it sometimes because as you climb that ladder, if everyone around you is just agreeing with you, It's like, "Wait, are we really growing? Are we getting somewhere here?" It's almost awkward. But I also have to remember something. My title changes the room whether I want it to or not. I can walk into a conversation, join a call virtually, believing that I'm just having a conversation. We're just chatting.

The person sitting across from me might be thinking, " The CEO is asking me this question. I need to be very careful about how I answer." Those are two completely different experiences happening in the same room.

There is research around this too, particularly in environments where hierarchy matters. Amy Edmondson has studied teams in healthcare environments, including operating rooms, where speaking up can have enormous consequences.

Her research has shown the importance of leaders reducing the interpersonal risks associated with differences in power and status so that people are willing to speak up with questions, concerns, and observations. Think about how applicable that is outside an operating room. The more authority you have, the more intentional you may have to become about creating room for someone with less authority to actually challenge you.

Your title enters the room before your personality does. I can tell somebody, you can always tell me the truth. You can come to me for anything. I'm always here for you. In fact, I've been on the receiving end of those very statements, and then I have been in a situation where I thought, oh, that boss totally has my back.

She or he said they did, and now all of a sudden, I've just said the wrong thing. I've overstepped. I followed their lead. I took the bait, and then I crossed the wrong person. So the reality is, no matter how much I can say, you can always tell me the truth. I'm always here for you. They're still talking to the CEO.

I don't get to pretend the power difference disappears because I consider myself approachable. the human side of leadership. We like to believe people experience us according to our intentions. They don't. They experience us according to our behavior, their history with us, their history with other leaders, the culture around them, and the amount of psychological safety they feel in that moment.

You may intend to be approachable. That doesn't automatically mean people experience you as approachable. You may believe you welcome disagreement, but what happens to your face when someone disagrees with you? What happens to your tone? Do you immediately start explaining? Do you interrupt? Do you ask for feedback and then spend 10 minutes telling the person why their feedback isn't quite accurate?

Because if you do that enough times, eventually people will stop giving it to you. And here's where leaders can make a terrible mistake. We interpret their silence as agreement. It's not always agreement. Sometimes silence is learned behavior. People learn what is worth bringing to you. They learn which conversations go well and which ones don't.

They learn whether bad news gets met with curiosity or frustration. They learn whether admitting a mistake results in problem solving or humiliation. They learn whether challenging an idea makes them part of the conversation or makes them difficult. Eventually, they're gonna adapt. And this is where I found one of the most interesting pieces of research for this entire episode.

When Edmondson was studying teamwork and errors in hospital environments, there was initially a counterintuitive finding. Some of the better performing teams appeared to report more errors. Wait, what? That sounds like backwards to me. You would expect the best teams to make fewer mistakes, but the explanation that emerged was incredibly important.

Those teams weren't necessarily making more mistakes. They were more willing to talk about the mistakes that they were making. That changes the way I think about a problem-free team. Sometimes the team reporting no problems isn't the healthiest team in the building. Maybe nobody is telling you what's happening, and leaders need to hear that because silence can feel wonderful.

No one's complaining. No one's challenging anything. Meetings are easy. Clients are happy. Customers are great. Patients are doing wonderful. Everybody agrees with you. You can walk away believing you've created this incredibly aligned organization, or you've created an organization where everybody has learned that disagreeing with you isn't worth it.

Those two organizations can look remarkably similar from the leader's chair. Then one day, something happens and the leader says, "Why didn't anybody tell me?" Well, maybe somebody tried. Maybe they tried six months ago. Maybe they brought something up in a meeting, and you shut it down too quickly. Maybe they brought you a problem once, and your reaction taught them not to bring you the next one.

Maybe you said, "Hey, my door is always open," but every experience they had walking through your door communicated something completely different. There is an enormous difference between having an open door policy and being a person people feel safe walking through the door talking to. And I don't say that from a perfect position where I've figured all of this out, because I haven't.

 I have stressful days. I have moments when I'm frustrated. I have moments when somebody tells me something and my immediate thought is, "How are we dealing with this again?" There are days when I'm carrying things the person talking to me knows absolutely nothing about, and I guess that's leadership. But my team doesn't become responsible for everything else happening in my life just because I'm the CEO, and that's something that I've really, really had to learn.

I have suffered and suffered and suffered some of the most horrific things while owning multiple businesses simultaneously, still having all of those businesses today and even more, and many times my team has no idea. Sometimes my core leadership team, the closest to me, know. But I've had to learn along the way, and I think one of the biggest mistakes leaders make is believing that good intentions somehow cancel out bad impact.

They don't. You can love your team and communicate poorly. You can care deeply about your company and create unnecessary pressure. You can have incredibly high standards and communicate those standards inconsistently. You can be generous, supportive, loyal, hardworking, committed, and still have a blind spot that is making it harder for the people around you to succeed.

Being a good person does not mean you can't be the problem in the room. I think mature leadership gives us enough security to hold both truths at the same time. I can be a good leader and still have something I need to change. I can make a bad decision without becoming a bad person. I can receive criticism without turning it into referendum on my entire leadership career I can say, "I got that wrong," without losing authority.

In fact, I think some leaders have authority completely backwards. They believe admitting that they're wrong will weaken their position, and usually the very opposite happens. Think about a leader you worked for who could never admit a mistake. Everybody knew that person was wrong. No one was confused.

The leader wasn't protecting their credibility by refusing to acknowledge it. They were slowly spending it. Now think about someone who could say, " I handled that wrong, and I should have communicated that differently. Let me fix that." You don't normally lose respect for that person. You trust them more, and this is where psychological safety becomes so important.

Amy Edmondson's work has helped establish psychological safety as a major area of organizational research, and a 2023 review in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior looked across decades of research and examined its relationship to areas including performance, learning, employee experience, and leadership.

So this isn't just about making people feel good. We're talking about whether an organization can communicate. Can it learn? Can it adapt?

Whether someone is telling you something isn't working before it becomes a much larger problem. The American Psychological Association of 2024 Work in America survey also examined psychological safety among more than 2,000 employed adults and its relationship to workplace experiences, including employees' ability to express themselves and contribute in their workplaces.

And because so many of you listening work in dentistry or healthcare, this matters to me. Research examining psychological safety in healthcare has connected it with communication, team learning, quality improvement, and employees' willingness to speak up about errors. Think about what that means in a dental office.

If somebody sees something wrong with an eligibility verification, a claim, a patient account, a document, scheduling, sterilization, or something else affecting the patient or practice, I don't want that employee sitting there calculating whether telling somebody is emotionally safe. I want them telling somebody.

I'd rather know about a mistake while we can fix it than create a culture where everybody becomes incredibly skilled at hiding one.  And psychological safety doesn't mean accountability disappears. I wanna make that distinction because sometimes people hear psychological safety and they interpret it as everybody being comfortable all the time.

No. Growth can be uncomfortable. Accountability can be uncomfortable. Being told your performance isn't meeting expectations can be uncomfortable. Having someone disagree with you can be uncomfortable. Psychological safety isn't a promise that nobody experiences discomfort. It's creating an environment where people can participate honestly without believing honesty itself is going to cost them.

And leaders set the temperature much more than we realize. Gallup has estimated that managers account for at least 70% of variance in employee engagement scores across business units. 70%. Now, that does not mean a manager controls 70% of everything an employee thinks, feels, or does. That's not what this statistic means.

But it does tell us something about the enormous influence management can have on the environment where engagement develops. So when someone tells me, "My team just isn't engaged," I think there's actually another question worth asking. What is happening in the environment they're being asked to engage with?

Because engagement isn't something we can simply demand from people. We create conditions that either encourage it or make it incredibly difficult. Think about something as simple as urgency. This is one I've had to pay attention to because I move fast. I run companies. I've got a lot happening. When I see something that needs to be done, my brain can immediately go to, "Let's fix it.

Let's move. Why are we waiting?" There are situations where that's incredibly valuable, but if everything coming from the leader is urgent, eventually the team loses the ability to distinguish between an actual emergency and a leader's preferred pace, and that can be a leadership problem. If expectations change consistently because I have new information, but I don't explain that information to the team, that's a leadership problem.

If I tell someone I want them to take ownership, but then override every decision they make, that's a leadership problem. If I say I want initiative, but criticize people every time they try to do something differently than I would've done it, eventually they stop taking initiative.

Then I cannot turn around six months later and complain that nobody takes initiative Do you see how easily this happens? Sometimes we create the behavior we later resent, and that's why self-awareness actually does matter. Self-awareness isn't sitting around thinking about yourself all day. It's developing enough awareness to notice the relationship between your behavior and the environment forming around you.

There's another leadership diagnostic hiding in plain sight, and it's that patterns are data. One employee struggling might be an employee problem. Two might be a coincidence. But if you keep hiring different people and eventually experiencing the same exact problem with all of them, eventually you have to stop studying the people and start studying the system they're entering, and the leader is part of that system.

If every team you've ever managed is too sensitive, maybe look at your communication. If every great employee eventually becomes difficult, look closer. If nobody can ever meet your expectations, examine the expectations. If you're constantly saying, "Nobody cares as much as I do," remember that you're comparing an employee's relationship with your organization to your relationship with something that you own or you may own.

Those are not the same relationship. That doesn't mean lower your standards. I don't believe in lowering standards to make leadership easier. It means you make your standards clear enough that another human being can actually succeed under them, and then ask yourself whether you are modeling what you are demanding because leaders are very good at noticing inconsistency below them.

We are sometimes less talented at recognizing it in ourselves. We notice when an employee misses a deadline. Do we notice when we tell somebody we'll have an answer Tuesday and we don't respond until Friday? We notice when an employee communicates poorly, but do we notice when we send a frustrated message without enough context?

We notice when people don't follow the process, but do we follow our own processes when following them becomes inconvenient? We notice when somebody isn't prepared for a meeting. Are we? Leadership creates a magnifying glass. Your behavior has more weight because people are watching what becomes acceptable.

And that's why this isn't about perfection. If perfection were the requirement for leadership, none of us would qualify. It's about congruence. Can people reconcile what you say with what you do? And when those two things don't match, are you willing to see it?

I think there's a question every leader should become comfortable asking. What part of this belongs to me? Not all of it. That's important because I also don't want leaders listening to this episode walking away believing every employee problem is evidence of a leadership failure because it's not.

People make choices. They fail to perform. They behave badly. They lie. They ignore expectations. People sometimes have to leave your organization. We talked about that last week, actually. But accountability has to work in both directions. Last week, I asked you whether you're saving someone from the consequences of their choices This week I'm asking you whether you might be saving yourself from the consequences of yours.

That's harder, because we can explain ourselves better than anybody. We know why we sent the message. We know why we're frustrated. We know why we changed the deadline. We know why we made the decision or why we have access to all of our intentions, but other people don't. They only have access to what we did, and sometimes leadership growth begins when we stop defending the intention long enough to examine the impact.

Before I keep going, I want to recognize Dentistry Support, the sponsor of the Human Side of Leadership summer series. Dentistry Support works alongside dental offices across the country, providing remote dental office support in areas including eligibility verification, billing and accounts receivable, phones, and administrative support.

Our entire purpose is helping dental practices create stronger systems behind the patient experience, so the people inside the practice can focus on the work that belongs there. If you're a dental professional who isn't ready for support but wants to make your practice better, we have free training available at dentristysupport.com/freetraining.

These are resources created around the actual issues we see in dental offices every single day, and they're there for you to use. There's a reason I mentioned Dentistry Support in the middle of this particular conversation. I have had to practice this leadership lesson inside my own largest brand. I have had situations where I thought the team needed more training, and the real problem was that the process wasn't clear.

I have had situations where I wanted somebody to take more ownership, but I had to ask whether we'd actually given that person enough authority to own the outcome. I've had moments where I was frustrated with communication and then had to look at how I communicated. That doesn't mean every issue became my fault.

It means I became part of the investigation. And I think that's a much healthier way to look at leadership. When something repeatedly isn't working, don't immediately assign blame. Just investigate. Look at the employee. Look at the process, the training, the workload, the expectation, the communication, and have enough courage to look at the leader, including when the leader is you.

Because there is something incredibly freeing about discovering that you are contributing to a problem. I know that sounds strange, but think about it. If you're contributing to it, you have some ability to change it. That's a lot better than spending 10 years believing everyone around you is the problem.

And I want to give you one more distinction before we wrap up this episode. Feedback is information. It is not the verdict. Someone telling you that they experienced your leadership a certain way doesn't automatically mean their interpretation is completely correct. But it also doesn't mean that you should dismiss it because you remember the situation differently.

Two people can walk out of the same meeting having experienced two completely different meetings. That's why self-awareness requires both an internal view and an external one. You know your intentions. Other people know your impact. A mature leader needs information from both, and maybe that's why that self-awareness research actually matters.

If there's really that enormous gap between the number of people who believe they are self-aware and the number who actually demonstrate it, then none of us should assume we've reached some point in leadership where we no longer need another set of eyes. I don't want people around me who simply confirm everything I already believe about myself.

I need people who care enough about me, the company, and the people we're responsible for and tell me when something isn't working, and I expect that from my team, and they know I do. There are many times that we will be in a group chat or a conference call or some sort of meeting, and my team and I are bantering back and forth.

That is healthy. You absolutely should reach some sort of opposition with people in your team at any given time and have a healthy conversation. You aren't always right, I'm not always right, and they aren't always right. But you've gotta have a responsibility to not punish people for having the courage to tell you things because I have that responsibility.

So as we get to our that's good moment, here's what I want you to remember this week. Accountability that only travels down an organization isn't really accountability. That's authority. Real accountability has to be able to travel upward, too. Your title should never make you unreachable, your success should never make you unteachable, and your experience should never convince you that you've outgrown the need to examine yourself.

So here's your action item this week. Think of one reoccurring problem in your organization, where you work, at your office. Don't pick 10. I want you to pick one. Maybe it's turnover. Maybe it's communication. Maybe deadlines keep getting missed. Maybe nobody takes initiative. Maybe meetings aren't effective.

Your strongest employees seem burnt out. People are afraid to make decisions without you. Maybe everything somehow keeps landing back on your desk. Whatever it is, write it down, and if you're thinking about it right now, write it down. If you got your cell phone next to you and you got your notes app, open it up, type it in your phone.

Okay. Now that you got that, I want you to ask yourself, what am I doing, allowing, rewarding, avoiding, or failing to communicate that might be helping this continue? I'm gonna repeat that again. What am I doing, allowing, rewarding, avoiding, or failing to communicate that might be helping this continue?

Don't answer immediately. I just want you to sit with it. And if you really wanna know whether you are a self-aware leader, ask somebody you trust to answer it, too. Then comes the hard part. Don't explain yourself. Do not tell them why they're misunderstanding you.

Don't correct every detail. Don't defend the intention. I just want you to listen. You can decide later whether you agree. First, understand why they experienced it that way. You may discover the problem isn't you. You may discover part of it is. Either answer gives you something useful. And before I leave you today, I want to make sure you know exactly where we're going from right here.

We are officially down to one episode remaining in the Human Side of Leadership summer series. Next week is episode 140, and it's a big one. It's our summer series finale and the season five finale of No Silver Spoons. I want that conversation to bring this entire season home.

We have talked about the stories we tell ourselves. We've talked about becoming the leader your team actually needs. We've talked about the difference between being liked and being respected. We've talked about culture, integrity, emotional intelligence. We've talked about trying to save people who weren't willing to save themselves.

And today, we've talked about having enough self-awareness to consider that sometimes we might be contributing to the very problem we're trying to solve. So there's one final question left. What will people remember about the way you led them? Not your title, your revenue, how many people reported to you.

Not what was written underneath your name, but what did it feel like to be led by you? That's episode 140. And then we're gonna close the book on season five. But No Silver Spoons isn't going anywhere because episode 141 officially opens season six, and I decided I don't want to squeeze a season six introduction into the final 10 minutes of season five, so season six deserves its own beginning.

Episode 141 will be exactly that. I'm gonna sit down with you and tell you where we're going next. I'm gonna tell you why we chose this direction for season six, what we're gonna be talking about, and what I want you to take away from it, and why I believe this particular season is coming at exactly the right time.

Because we are heading into the final months of 2026. Soon, everyone that you talk to is going to start talking about finishing the year strong. Then we'll turn around and suddenly we'll be talking about 2027. New budgets, goals, strategies, plans, expectations, maybe new businesses, maybe new positions, maybe completely different versions of organizations that looked very different 12 months earlier.

And I don't want season six to simply tell you to set bigger goals. I want us to talk about execution, strategy, growth, decisions, leadership, and what it actually takes to finish one year well while preparing intelligently for the next one.

We're gonna get practical. We're going to talk about things you can actually take back to your organization, and we're going to have conversations about what we are carrying forward and what isn't working anymore. What needs to change before the calendar changes, and how leaders can stop waiting until January to start acting like the person they're promising that they're going to become.

 But I'm not giving you that entire roadmap today. That's what episode 141 is for. Consider it our season six orientation. I'll give you the details. I'll tell you why we're going there. And then I'll tell you what I think you're going to need as we close 2026 and start preparing for 2027.

And then with episode 142, we'll dive right in. No long runway, no four episode of introductions. We're just gonna get to work, and I cannot wait

Thank you for spending time with me today. Thank you for continuing to listen, for sharing these episodes, and especially for taking these conversations back in to your own companies and teams. I'm Sarah Beth Herman, and this is No Silver Spoons. Your next move  📍 matters.

Make it with intention. I'll catch you on the next episode