710: What’s Your Leadership Style?
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What kind of leader is your pet care business creating you to become? In this episode, we talk through five common leadership styles: the visionary, the operator, the servant leader, the coach, and the commander. We explore how each style shows up for solo sitters, team owners, clients, and employees. We also look at the strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots that come with each approach. As our businesses grow, we have to ask whether the style that helped us start is still the style we need moving forward.
Main topics:
Leading yourself first
Visionary leadership strengths
Systems versus people
Boundaries and burnout
Adapting leadership styles
Main takeaway: “The challenge is that most business owners continue using the same leadership style that helped them start the business, even when the business now needs something different.”
That line’s hard to hear, because what helped us survive the early days may not be enough to sustain the next stage. As a solo sitter, our leadership might look like discipline, boundaries, and client communication. As our business grows, leadership starts to include culture, accountability, delegation, and developing other people. The goal is not to label one style as good or bad, but to understand our strengths and our blind spots. Our business may need a different version of our leadership than it did a year ago.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
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Meghan 0:01
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. Hi, I'm Megan.
Collin 0:04
I'm Collin.
Meghan 0:05
We are the hosts of Pet Sitter Confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. We appreciate you joining us today. We'd also like to thank our sponsors, Pet Sitters Associates, and our Patreon supporters. We have a new one, Kathy Duvall. Thank you so much for being a longtime listener of the podcast. We are so grateful that you love it and you want it to keep going. So, if you are listening and you are a dog walker and pet sitter, just like Kathy, and you find value in the podcast, you can go to Pet Sitter confessional.com/support This episode is all about leadership style, so think about if your clients or employees or your spouse or significant other had to describe your leadership style in one sentence, what would they say? You may be saying, Megan, I'm a solo, I don't have a team of employees, but leadership still applies to you. A lot of us pet sitters think that leadership is about managing employees, it's not. Shocker, leadership starts with leading ourselves first, leading our schedule, our clients, our standards, our business, leading it in the right direction. If you have a team long before you hired your first employee, you're already practicing leadership every day. The first employee you hire doesn't experience your leadership style for the first time, when they join your company, they experience that leadership style you've been practicing on yourself for years, leading yourself well, having that self-discipline. So, if you're disorganized as a solo sitter, you're likely to create a disorganized team, and nobody wants that, but sometimes that's what we've cultivated over the years, if we struggle with boundaries, which I think a lot of us do, our team is going to feel the effects of that. They're going to be pushed more and more outside of their comfort zone, and not in a good way, because the boundaries are being pushed. If you avoid difficult conversations with clients, you're likely going to avoid difficult conversations with employees. This leads to a bad culture. We have to think about this from a holistic perspective of we've been leading ourselves, now we have to lead the team, and what does that look like? So we're going to break down some leadership styles, and as we go through these, think about which one you are. The first one is the visionary, so you say, I see where we're going, I'm steering the ship, I'm the captain, so this is big picture thinking. This is being innovative, creative, being excited about the journey. Being an entrepreneur is hard, being a small business owner is hard, but when you can know that, yes, I'm going to have ups and downs, but we are excited. I am along for this ride, wherever this takes me, that's really the visionary. This is kind of dream casting and forecasting, not predicting the future, but saying, okay, in five years, in 10 years, this is where I want to be, this is where I want to take the company. It's not necessarily the day-to-day numbers, it's vision casting, goal setting, where do I want to be, how do I get there? What partnerships do I need to have? Some weaknesses with this, though, are that we're constantly chasing new ideas. We can kind of get that squirrel of going from one thing to the next, that shiny object syndrome. We may have difficulty finishing projects because of that shiny object syndrome. We go, oh, it's the grass is greener over here, or I have this idea and I want to go do this, and this is kind of.. I was working on this project, but now it's kind of boring, and it's, you know, hard work, and I don't really want to finish it, so I'm just going to chase something else. We have this frequency and shifting direction of this pivot all the time. This visionary leader can really be summed up in the sitter who launches a podcast and redesigns their website, and creates new services, explores new softwares and dreams about the future expansion of the company, but really struggles to complete existing projects. You may say, yes, I want to do this new thing, but I actually have a few other things burning over here that need to get done, but I don't really want to do them, so I'm going to just think about the future.
Meghan 3:58
If you identify with this leadership style, think about how many great ideas are sitting unfinished in your business right now. Is there anything that you actually do need to tackle? Are you 95% of the way there on some things, and you just need to crest a little bit more to see the finished product? Then the visionary leadership style is probably you. The next style is the operator. It says let's build a better system, so your strengths, if you are the operator style, are organization. You love it. It is in your wheelhouse to be hyper organized, to have all the notes and all the files in correct order. It's also that consistency of knowing day to day, this is what I'm going to do, or this is how I get it done, because I have systems in place to do it, that reliability of you get things done, it's what you do, the scalability aspect of it. You know how to 10x something, and you can see it in your mind, but with this type of leadership style, it can oftentimes be hard to delegate things, because you think in your mind, well, I know the best. Them, or I know the fastest way to get this done. I don't have time to teach someone, or I don't want to teach somebody else. So, it's that perfectionism that we're always chasing, of well, if I just eke out two more percent on this, it'll, it'll be perfect. I have to time, I can do this. We get trapped inside our own business, we can't necessarily see the way out, because we're so in the weeds. So, you may have a beautiful onboarding system or detailed SOPs and flawless reports, but you haven't taken a vacation in years because nobody else is going to do things the way you do it, or correctly, or it's not perfect yet, whatever that means for you. If this sounds like you, think about if your systems are creating freedom or they're creating a prison. Do you feel boxed in because you have to get your tasks done that day, or you're not going to feel complete? You have to check everything off, you have to have a clean inbox, or else you can't go to bed at night. If that sounds like you, you may have the operator leadership style. Then there's the leader who says, I want to serve, and this is the third type of leader, the servant leader, they say, "I'm here to help. I want to provide outstanding client service and loyalty. I want my clients to trust me. I want to build those strong, lasting relationships that build repeat clients over the long term. We kind of wear our heart on our sleeves, and because of that, a lot of times we have poor boundaries. We say, okay, this time I'll make an exception to this rule, or I won't abide by this in my contract this one time, and then that scope creep starts to happen, and we say, oh well, it was just that one client, and now it's three or four or 10, and why do I even have this policy anymore? Sometimes we commit to things that we shouldn't. We have a really busy summer, we're booked out, but also summer is a time for a lot of events, and so we've booked two events every single month, and now we're pulling our hair out because we're so busy, we don't actually have time for the events, but we committed to them, so we feel like we have to attend. All of this can lead to burnout. We answer texts at 10pm we accept every request, we rearrange our personal life to avoid disappointing anyone. We don't want angry clients, we don't want them being mad or leaving a bad review. And so that burnout starts to come in. Maybe we start resenting our business. We want to just shut it all down. We can't take it anymore. At what point does exceptional service become self-sacrifice? I'm sacrificing my, my personal joy in life for this business. Well, that's not necessarily worth it. So, think about if you are the servant leader and you're saying, well, I'm always here to help. Think about how you can balance this out of wanting to build those deep, lasting relationships while also not wanting to burn out.
Meghan 7:40
The fourth type of leadership style is the coach. They say, I want to grow, I want to be better, I want to educate myself. They're the lifelong learner, going to conferences, reading books, listening to podcasts. They're very self-aware of who they are, what they want, and they're very growth-oriented. They don't have a fixed mindset of, well, I just, I have to stay here, and this is where I'm comfortable. No, they want to continue expanding beyond their knowledge, beyond their comfort zone. They are very curious and always wanting to know more, diving deep into business practices of how can I make this better, or what are the numbers that I need to know for this, but sometimes all of that information can lead to analysis paralysis. We have an overconsumption of information. We have so much data that we actually don't know where to start. We're kind of a blank slate, a blank sheet of paper, and we don't know where to start. This can happen a lot of times when you go to an in-person conference and you get so much information over a two to three day period, and you come home and you kind of just want to rest, because your brain has been so wired, and you've almost kind of forgotten everything that you've been taught. A few days or a week go by, and you remember even less now, and you don't implement anything of what you learn. The same thing can happen if you buy every business book out there, or read a lot of them, or join every mastermind, but you never raise prices or never do the things that the coach is telling you to do that would make your business better. You have all of this information, but now you don't know what to do with it. For this type of person, you really have to think if you are learning to improve or learning to avoid action. I can learn all day about how to run my numbers, but if the if I don't actually want to run my numbers, if it's too icky for me, I can learn all day about the latest marketing fad or advertising campaign that everybody else says works, but if I don't actually want to do the work that's going to be required in order to put that into practice, then all the knowledge, all the data is going to be for naught. The fifth style of leader is the commander. This person says, 'Let's get it done. Let's go. I'm ready. They're very action-oriented. They're the one who's very disciplined when they say they're going to do something. They're going to do it, and they're going to do it on time. They're very decisive. They don't sit on decisions for a long time. They, they act and they go. They're resilient. They say. Okay, we just let the fires happen as they're going to, we learn from them, and we move on. We just kind of push our way through, and we can do this. A lot of times, though, this person can feel isolated because they're the only ones at the top, or at least they feel like that. There's not really this feedback loop that's going on, because they're just kind of bulldozing their way through the china shop and breaking things along the way. There's not somebody on the back end that's going, "Hey, wait, wait, wait, you might be a little impulsive on this decision. You should probably think a little bit more about the implications of what you're about to do, because if you don't, that can lead to burnout. You're just going full force all of the time, you're not resting, you're not taking a break. The commander style is really somebody who refuses help and solves every problem alone, wears exhaustion like a badge of honor when it really isn't. If you are this type of person, or this resonates with you, think about when does independence become stubbornness. You just go full force into actions, you don't care who you, who you run over in the bus on the way, you just want to do it.
Meghan 11:06
So, these five leadership styles - the visionary, the operator, the servant leader, the coach, and the commander - really reflect more about yourself and how you've trained yourself over the years, how you deal with yourself, and thus, how you deal with others, because as businesses grow, this leadership style, it becomes less about managing ourselves and more about influencing others. How do we lead well? What does that look like based on how I've led myself in the past and what I want moving forward, because just because you've trained yourself in one of these tactics doesn't mean you have to keep doing that moving forward. The challenge is that most business owners continue using the same leadership style that helped them start the business, even when the business now needs something different, and that's a mind shift that we have to have. So, if you have employees, listen up, because this next part is going to be for you. We're going to walk through the same five steps, but now think about it from a team aspect.
Collin 12:02
But before we do that, we want to tell you about our friends at Pet Sitters Associates. Running a pet care business comes with risk. You're in clients' homes, you're handling animals, you're navigating unpredictable situations every single day. Pet Sitters Associates provides the insurance coverage designed specifically for pet care professionals, so you can focus on doing your job well without constantly wondering what if, if you're not properly covered, or if you've been meaning to review your policy. Today is the right moment. Head on over to Petsit llc.com to learn more and get started today. And as a listener of this show, you're going to get $10 off your membership when you use the code confessional at checkout again, that's Petsit llc.com
Meghan 12:43
The first one again was visionary, so I see what's possible. You can inspire your team to grow in their own strengths and also as a collective. It really creates this momentum of yes, we can do it, we can push forward. I know this is a really busy week, but we got this, guys. It attracts the talent, it attracts employees. They see this culture of positivity and inspiration, and they go, "I want in on that. It encourages innovation. Where can we go? What are the possibilities here? How can we better serve clients? How can we better serve the community at large? Sometimes, though, this does overwhelm staff. They can say, well, I'm just here to walk dogs. I don't know all of the business aspects on this. I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I'm a little overwhelmed here. Can you help me out? We talked about as a solo chasing the shiny object syndrome, and same thing here with this constant change with a team, it can almost feel repelling of they don't know which way the wind is blowing today, and because of that, this instability, there is this weak follow through of, well, I know we said we were going to initiate this new program or this new service, but I don't think doubling down on it right now is a good idea. I thought it was okay, but now it's not. And, of course, there's times that we need to change our minds on things, or we get new information, or new data that's going to inform us that this probably wasn't the best decision, but it can make you seem like a weak leader, this visionary, the positivity we want that aspect, but we don't want to be seen as weak or constantly changing our mind. Employees really need that stability, so try to avoid talking about new service lines and partnerships and technology and future opportunities every week, because that the employees are going to get excited about that, and then they're going to get their hopes up, and then when you continue to pull back on that, they're potentially going to question your authority. So, if you think you are the visionary style with your employees, think about if your employees feel inspired by you, or if they feel exhausted by you, none of us wants to feel exhausted by our employees, but we do have to think about how they interpret our actions, and what we say to them matters. We don't want to over promise and under deliver, just like we don't with our clients. The same with our employees. With the operator leadership style, it says, let's build a business that works, works for me. Works for you, works for our clients, works as a whole for our community, and builds it up. It really relies on that consistency from one visit to the next, from one employee to the next. That cohesion is really what this is about. It's also about accountability. I am accountable to you as the employee, just as you are to me. When I say I'm going to do something, I do it, and when we talk on our one to one meetings, I'm going to have some clear expectations for you. I'm going to hold you accountable as well. This leads to this scalability aspect, and when we have team camaraderie, we are able to 10x things. We are able to say, okay, this worked once, and because of us all coming around it and moving it forward, we can do it even better, and even bigger. We do have to be careful with this one, though, because we can struggle with flexibility. We aren't able to easily pivot or adapt to new things happening because of this rigidity in our business. We can also, at times, feel very cold. We may prioritize systems over people, and go well, I this is the most efficient way to do this, and I understand you may not like it, but this is the best thing for the business. So, this can be the owner who's obsessed with time to pet workflows and report standards and GPS tracking and documented procedures.
Meghan 16:16
If this sounds like you, ask yourself if your systems are serving your people or if they're controlling them, it can be so easy to over systematize our businesses and look up in 12 months or five years and go, well, my business has completely shifted, and I'd actually have a higher turnover rate with employees because I didn't actually keep their business interests in mind, I was just looking at the bottom dollar or what the data said, it is a fine balance, then you have the other side of the coin of somebody who is a servant leadership style, and they go, I work for my team, I am theirs to mold and shape, and this does create a strong culture of the employees go, wow, this person, I feel like they really care about me, they want my best interest, and it creates these loyal employees that are here for years to come. You may sacrifice some percent profit, but you feel it's worth it because of the high trust of your team, that they feel they can come to you with anything, and you'll hear them out. With this leadership style, it can be difficult to have those hard conversations. You don't want people to leave, you want to be empathetic and compassionate to what they're going through, and so sometimes you do avoid that accountability, you say, well, I know we have this metric that we were working towards, but because this thing happened, or I understand, sometimes it's just not possible to attain this. We can also feel like we're carrying everyone's burdens. This is not necessarily a very healthy place to be, because we do have to have some separation, of course. We need to be compassionate, but our job is not to carry the burdens of other people. It's to hear them out, have empathy, and try to find that balance between what's best for the business and what's best for the people. If you are someone who constantly covers shifts and takes emergency visits and rescues employees from every difficult situation. This could be you. This servant leadership style. Think about if your helping has become enabling. At what point do you think that people are taking advantage of you? Because you always say yes, even if it means that you have to delay your vacation or not take your vacation at all, because your employees need the help, of course. We all want our employees to succeed, but the coach leadership style really says I want to develop leaders. Of course, I want to retain my employees, but I want to make them into something more than they currently are. I want to mold and shape them to potentially one day take over my company, or want to create that ownership of the company and encourage this growth of incremental raises or incremental milestones, certificates, new opportunities, and education within my company, so that they can succeed. Something you have to watch out for, though, is if you tolerate poor performance for too long, you say, "Oh, well, that's okay, we can, we can get it next time, or I understand it was hard, you can try again next week. At some point, the rubber has to meet the road, and you have to have the difficult conversation. You can't necessarily be slow to make decisions, because you don't want that to affect the client happiness on the back end. You don't want to say, "Oh, well, I know you forgot to scoop the litter this time, you can get it next time, it's not a big deal. Now, occasionally that is okay, but if they constantly are making the same mistake over and over again, you do have to have that accountability. You can support them and come alongside them and give them more training, but if they continue to have the same issues over and over again, it may be time to let that person go. If you love mentoring your new employees and helping them grow professionally within your company and moving up the ladder, so to speak. Then you are probably the coach leadership style. The takeaway for you is thinking about how long development opportunities should be given before the accountability takes over. How many chances do you give them, and it's going to vary depending on the person, their experience, the task.
Meghan 19:59
Asks that you give them, but when does that accountability take over with a team of employees? The commander leader says we have a job to do, and let's go do it, guys. It kind of rallies the troops and says let's go, we have a clear direction, we know how to get there, we can make these fast decisions and have this strong accountability within the team, because we all know everybody is going for the same goal, and we're going after it. Let's go, let's go. This type of leader knows how to handle emergencies and is excellent in adverse conditions, but they do have some team dependency. They are the ones leading the charge. The team doesn't necessarily know how to come around and lead, because they have the leader, because you're the one leading the charge. It may reduce the initiative of other team members. They may go, "Well, I know that they're going to take charge, so I don't really need to. I can pull back a little bit. You are probably this type of leader if you do amazing in a snowstorm, or a power outage, or a major scheduling crisis. The holiday rush is where you thrive. You do have to watch out for that lower morale, though. Not everybody is going to have the same energy level or the same drive at going the full distance that you want to. So, if you are solo, think about which one you are: the visionary, the operator, the servant leader, the coach, or the commander. And if you have a team, think about if it switched once you had a team, if you are still the same leader, or if you need to morph into something else. The leadership style that's unhealthy during a normal week may be exactly what's needed during a crisis. Your leadership style does change as your business grows, and it should change, because during that first stage, you are leading yourself, you have your own habits, your own discipline. Your boundaries are going to be different than the solo sitter down the street. Also, your time management, how you structure your time when you are solo, is going to be vastly different than when you have a team. When you are solo, you can trust yourself to do what needs to get done. This may sound like a silly question, but when you are solo, can you trust yourself to do what needs to get done? Do you have the accountability, the people around you that are going to say, "Hey, you said this thing, you need to uphold this? It can be so easy to make an exception for one or two clients and then wake up and now it's 50 clients, because no one was holding you to your standard. So, when you're solo, you lead yourself well, but then you also need to do stage two, which is leading your clients, and this is where you guide them on your communication and your expectations, also your pricing and your policies. How do you bring them into the fold? How do you lead them well through their client journey and the onboarding process? Obviously, you have to have clients to run your business, but it's not just you anymore. It can be so easy to people please, but we don't want to fall in that trap. Can you influence client behavior without giving in to their every whim and fancy? If you choose to lead a team of employees, you then have to focus on their culture. What is it going to be positive? What are the words that you want to define how people come into your company, how they grow within the company, and also how they leave. That's part of your culture as well. The accountability aspects here. How many meetings are you going to have with them? What does their training and shadowing look like? What are the company standards that they have to uphold within visits, also within the community? What do your people need to know to do the best job they possibly can. It is important to somewhat ebb and flow with your employees over time. The culture may shift, and you may have to shift with it. Sometimes we don't like that, so we have to pull it back to and align it better with our company.
Meghan 23:37
We can't let it stray too far away from the core goals we have, so we do have to make sure, in general, that everybody is on the same page with how we're going to serve people. If you then choose to bring on managers and operations staff and people in between you and the field staff, then you have to really lead the leaders. Different departments you may have, you have to incorporate them into the vision of the company even more so than a field walker, because they're the ones that have to make the day in and day out decisions that affect the company, not just the dog walking and the cat sitting, but operationally they have to know and be enabled to make decisions for the betterment of the company. These are not easy decisions to make, but as you elevate yourself more out of the company, you have to think about what happens if you stop being the center of every decision. Are you empowering your managers to know how to handle tough situations and to make decisions for the betterment of everyone? Do they know how to lead the field walkers well? What is their leadership style, their management style? Think about the strengths and weaknesses of their leadership style, and how they complement yours. There isn't one best leadership style out there. It's all about thinking about what your natural tendencies are, and if they've changed over the years, then thinking about your blind spots. Do you have any? Where are they? What. People, do you need to surround yourself with to see your blind spot, so they can illuminate them for you. The best leaders also understand their strengths, yes, their weaknesses, but their strengths as well. And when a different style is required, when they need to shift, because the company is shifting, a servant leader may need to become a commander during a crisis, or a visionary may need to be an operator during a season of growth. A coach may need to become even more decisive when accountability is needed, and if you're an operator, you may need to become more relational when the culture starts slipping. There is no one size fits all, but it is important to know which one you are, because that informs your decisions. What leadership style built your business? Is it the same as it is today? Has it changed over the years? What leadership style do you need moving forward in your business? For a lot of us business owners, the answer is very different, because of the growth and change and adaptation and education that we do a lot of times. The business owner and the leadership style that we were a few years ago is not the same that we are today, and that's okay. We hope this has been helpful. We appreciate you listening. We would also like to thank our sponsors, Pet Sitters Associates. We will talk with you next time,
