Bossy Pants – Confidence and Leadership

“Kid, you’ll move mountains.” – Dr. Seuss

The other day my 6-year-old daughter Miss O, came home from school and told me about a conversation she had with a friend at recess.

Miss O: You are bossing me.

Friend: You’ve been bossing me since Kindergarten

There are times as a parent that I try not to laugh. This wasn’t one of them – I burst into laughter and my daughter laughed right alongside me. It sounds so dramatic that way – so much better than just last year. It also reminded me how early that word bossy is introduced for these young and precious girls.

It’s the fear of being called bossy that has made my confidence as a leader falter. I say that after 20 years of having my own business, teaching employees and subcontractors and being accountable to a bottom line for both my family and my company.

In the years that I’ve had business partners for my computer consulting business, they’ve always been male and I’ve been far more comfortable with them providing the visible leadership. Even when I’ve had better ideas, more experience and am the one calling the shots.

About a dozen years ago, I owned a small office building with two business partners that housed my consulting company offices. We’d purchased the building in 2007 at the height of the market. When things got messy because one business partner told me of my husband’s infidelities and my husband was the other business partner, our partnership in my consulting business fell apart and I bought back their shares in that company. But we still owned the building together and after the 2008 crash, the value of the building was less than its mortgage.

My partners were no longer interested in being involved, the building couldn’t make ends meet and I had to do something. So I went to the Small Business Administration and asked them to restructure the loan for the building. The advisor gave me a list of things I had to do like changing all the tenant leases and restructuring the accounting.

Five months later I scheduled an appointment with the SBA advisor, showed him the list and all that I had done to meet each point. He sat back and said, “I’m impressed.” I wondered why because all I’d done was what he’d told me. He replied, “Because not many people come back after I give the list of what needs to be done.” I burst into tears. Even through my tears, he restructured the loan for me anyway and when the market came back enough so we could sell the building, I finally sold it and ended the partnership with those guys.

And still after all that, I didn’t have the confidence to call myself a leader until about age 50 when I had children as a single person and they looked at me asking “what are we going to do today?”

Brené Brown defines a leader as “anyone who holds him or herself accountable for finding potential in people or processes.”  Fortunately that’s a definition that is broad enough for me to confidently own my leadership. Given that I’ve been leading for years, one wonders why I haven’t had the confidence to do so til now.

“Bossy” says it in one word. I don’t want to be called that word that people use for girls as early as first grade (and maybe earlier).

Brené Brown has a model of types of power as they relate to leadership (link goes to a PDF of the model). She differentiates people who lead using power over “believe that power is finite and use fear to protect and hoard power” from those who lead using power with/to/within. Those leaders in the latter category “center connection and humanity with empathy-driven agendas, policies and values.”

Those are a lot of big words for a first-grader but I think it’s worth trying to talk to my daughter about how to build confidence in leadership and power. I think any leader, male or female, who works with the power with/to/within is more effective because they believe that “getting it right is more important than being right.” And building on my daughter’s sense of empathy, she can learn the confidence to work with others to lead and not fear being called bossy.

Have you ever been called bossy? Do you think of yourself as a leader? If so, what gives you confidence as a leader?

This is my fourth post about confidence. Here are the others:

I Can

Fear and Confidence

Growth Mind-set

(featured photo from Pexels)

Advertisement