July Mobilizing Briefing- Leading Without Lowering Your Standards

I'm excited to introduce a new monthly resource from Mobilizing With Impact.

The Mobilizing Leadership Briefing is a monthly leadership teaching designed to equip leaders with practical frameworks, intentional reflection, and actionable strategies to help them lead with purpose, resilience, integrity, and impact. #leadershipgrowth 

Leading Without Lowering Your Standards
Pressure has a way of testing our values, our priorities, and our leadership. But great leaders don't eliminate pressure, they learn to remain anchored while moving through it.

In this month's briefing, we'll explore:
✅ Why this topic matters
✅ A leadership insight grounded in research
✅ The Mobilizing Leadership Method
✅ A practical leadership framework
✅ Your Mobilize Forward challenge for the week

For more Leadership resources and community, join Mobilizing With Impact Community-  Website: www.mobilizingwithimpact.com. #standards 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Welcome to the very first Mobilizing Leadership Briefing. I'm Adrian Benton, founder of Mobilizing with Impact, and each month we'll explore one leadership principle from the Mobilizing Leadership Method and one practical wisdom designed to help you lead yourself well, lead others well, and develop leaders who develop leaders. This month's theme, I'm super excited about it because I think it's a relevant one. This month's theme is leading without lowering your standards. Thank you for giving me a few minutes of your day. Have you ever noticed that pressure rarely asks us to abandon our values all at once? It it tends to whisper like this, just this once. Go ahead, lower your standards. Go ahead. No one will notice. Go ahead. Everyone else is doing it. But but leadership is rarely lost in one major decision. Think about it. More often it is shaped by the small compromises that we justify along the way. Now, this matters because leadership has never been easy. But today's leadership environment, oh, it presents unique challenges. Leadership research reminds us that leaders are navigating increasing levels of workplace stress, decision fatigue, and emotional exhaustion. As a matter of fact, studies from organizations like Gallup have found that managers experience significantly higher levels of stress than individual contributors. And leadership burnout, it continues to rise as expectations increase. While at the same time, leaders often are expected to make more decisions, adapt to constant change, and support the well-being of others while managing your own responsibilities. Pressure is part of leadership. It comes with the territory. But the danger comes when pressure begins to shape our character instead of revealing it. When pressure increases, there tends to be this temptation to lower our standards in order to reduce discomfort. Think about it. Sometimes we will lower expectations for our team because accountability, holding them accountable, feels difficult. Have you ever felt the temptation to avoid necessary conversations because conflict feels too uncomfortable? Or sometimes we we compromise our values because the easier decision right now, it seems to be more appealing than fighting through and standing up. We tend to neglect our health because there never seems to be enough time. How many times have you said, I'll go to the gym tomorrow? How many times have you said, Oh, I feel that pain in my shoulder, but I'm just going to push through. We sacrifice time with people who matter most because our work feels urgent. We see our family. We promise to go to the baseball game. We promise to have a date night, but I'll do it tomorrow. I'll do it next week. Can I reschedule? And the people who matter the most, the people who will be there when we retire, they get pushed to the side. Sometimes we even begin leading from exhaustion instead of leading from purpose. Is that you right now? You know, I've seen this through throughout my years of military leadership, ministry, coaching, and working with leaders across many different environments. Rarely do we as leaders wake up one morning and decide to abandon our values. No, more often, it happens through a small series of small compromises under the weight of the constant pressure. So you see, the problem isn't pressure. The problem is when we allow pressure to redefine who we are. The mobilizing leadership method teaches that resilient leaders, we don't eliminate pressure. We instead learn to remain anchored while moving through it. Right now, I want you to make a commitment to yourself that either you will start, you will begin, or you will renew your commitment to remain anchored while moving through pressure. That's right. Remain anchored while moving through pressure because leadership is not about avoiding the difficult season. It's about ensuring that difficult seasons never cause us to become someone we were never called to be. And if you're listening and watching this right now and you're navigating a season where you are not operating through authenticity, this is a good place to stop, call it out, and restart, renew, re-engage with you and how you engage with pressure. So, so this is exactly why the mobilizing leadership method teaches that pressure should never become permission to compromise. Instead, it becomes an invitation to strengthen our leadership from where? From the inside out. Boom, stop right there. Because this is a great place to pause and to reflect. Leadership does not begin when someone actually starts following you. When you get assigned to lead a team, it begins with how you lead yourself. Standards are not rules that we we impose on others. Standards, they are commitments that we make to ourselves. Your standard to yourself, first and foremost, will reflect your values to others. Your values will then shape your decisions. Your decisions will then determine your influence, and pressure does not create your character. Hear me again. Pressure reveals your character. That's why resilient leadership is not built during crisis. No, resilient leadership is developed long before the crisis arrives. How you respond to pressure is determined before the pressure is manifested. I want you to think about when you are walking through seasons of comfort. How are your beliefs and your values aligning so that when you find yourself in those pressure-filled moments, you are able to respond, not react authentically. So today, I would like to introduce a framework that you're going to hear often through the mobilizing leadership method. That framework is anchor. Anchor. Let's go through it. When pressure arises, you and I are to stay anchored. A align with your values. So before making a decision, I ask myself, does this align with who I say I am? Does this align with who I believe I am? Does this align with who I want to be in this culture, in this environment, in this life that I'm living every day? So A, align with your values. This is how we stay anchored. In notice the pressure. Sometimes we walk through life like there's a consistent cloud that is covering our eyes. No. We have an opportunity to notice the pressure because pressure is information. What is the pressure telling you? Is the pressure telling you that we need to go back and read the instruction? Is the pressure telling you that there's a gap in the process that we're walking through with the team right now? What does the pressure tell you? That you actually have everything you need. All you have to do is courageously execute. Pressure is information. So recognize what's influencing your thinking, what's influencing your desire to react? What will influence how you will respond in? Notice what is the pressure. C, choose courage over convenience. This is where many of us get trapped. You see, convenience produces temporary comfort. Convenience causes me to feel good right now. But courage, courage produces lasting influence. What do you want? Do you want the temporary or do you want legacy? And if you want legacy, then you must choose courage over convenience. Where in your leadership are you being called to choose courage over temporary comfort? Hold your boundaries. Healthy leaders, understand that boundaries protect what matters most. Society, people that have different intentions and motives for you, they will try to make you feel as though you should not have boundaries, or you're mean for having boundaries, or your boundaries don't make any sense. No, no, no. If you know that this is a healthy boundary that you must have in order to move forward courageously, then you gotta hold the boundary in the face of pressure. Because again, healthy leaders understand that boundaries safeguard, protect, hold what matters most. Now, here's another one that I love and that I have to remind myself of sometimes. Own your decisions, own it. You made the decision, own it. Stand what they say, stand 10 toes down on that decision. Leadership requires responsibility. So avoid making excuses. Own your influence. Stand firm on the decisions that you choose to make. You will find your team and others will respect you. They may not necessarily like or agree with what you're saying, and that's okay. But they will respect you when you own the decisions that you choose to make. Are rise with integrity. Integrity means consistent regardless of the circumstance. Consistent regardless of the listen, nobody's perfect, but we are all called to be progressive. Progressive means we continue to learn, we continue to try again. So if you make a mistake, it's okay. Get back up and get right back to hold in that boundary. Get right back to walking courageously. Get right back to being who you have said and believe that you can be through your values. Consistency. You know, leadership is strongest when our private convictions match our public actions. Ooh, I'm gonna say that one more time. Leadership. Your leadership is the strongest when our private convictions, our private conversations, our private, when our private match our public. When our private convictions, when our private commitments, when our private conversations, when our private matches our public actions, that's when our leadership is the strongest. So this week, this week, I am inviting you to ask yourself three questions. This is where you get a chance to get out your journal. You're gonna write it down. If you have to watch this on the replay to get the questions, then that's what I need you to do. Because this month, these questions are important. Number one, where am I most tempted to lower my standards? Where am I most tempted to lower my standards? And I have to say this: when you ask these questions, you're going to answer these questions with no judgment. This is just facts. When I look at my life, when I look at my leadership, where am I most tempted to lower my standards? Number two, what pressure is influencing my decision? What external and internal pressures, maybe internally, I have not uh always made the best decisions in the past. And so now, as I'm getting ready to make this decision, I'm second guessing myself. Or maybe externally there was somebody who said I'm not competent and I shouldn't be in the position that I'm in. So, what's influencing how I'm making my decisions? Okay, you got to be able to answer that. And number three, what value must remain non-negotiable? This is where you decide or you go back to your list of values, the values that you know are true to you. And and you have to remind yourself in this moment, as I'm processing through this pressure, what values must remain non-negotiables? Integrity might be one of your values. And so, in the face of pressure, you can remind yourself I will maintain authenticity, I will maintain honesty as I push through. It may not feel good, but the value of being someone who is honest, I am going to maintain it. Okay, so again, where am I most tempted to lower my standards? Number two, what pressure is influencing my decisions? And number three, what value must remain non-negotiable? How do we tie all this up? This month, you are invited to choose one area of leadership where you will intentionally raise your leadership rather than lower your standards. I love it. Because I need you to remember this pressure will always invite compromise. But purpose, ah, purpose will always call you and I higher. And that's what we want. We want to move higher, to move forward, to move in our leadership. This week's Mobilize Forward Action is simple. Write down your top three leadership standards. Place them somewhere that you can see them every single day. Before making an important decision this week, pause and ask: Does this decision strengthen my leadership? Or does this decision weaken it? Because small decisions shape great leaders. So as we conclude our leadership briefing, I want to leave you with this thought. Leadership is not tested when everything is easy. Leadership is revealed when pressure invites compromise. So never lower your standards to meet the pressure. Instead, raise your leadership to meet the moment. Before we meet again, I want you to ask yourself, what did you learn? And matter of fact, don't just ask yourself, but I'm inviting you to share your answer with another leader in your network. What did you learn? What will you do? And how are you going to mobilize forward this week, next week, and every single day? I want to thank you for joining me for the very first mobilizing leadership briefing. And throughout this month, we'll continue exploring this theme throughout the Transformation Station Leadership Podcast, throughout the leadership webinar, throughout the mobilizing prayer circle, and our leadership resources as we grow our mobilizing leadership library. So remember, this month in July, we have our next leadership webinar coming up with Christine Valdez, where we're literally going to be talking about leading without lowering our standards on July 19th. You can go ahead and click on the link in the description box to be able to register for that webinar. Before that, we have on July 12th our mobilizing prayer circle. We meet once a month to come together. We have a devotional, a time of prayer requests and testimonies, and then we pray together and we leave feeling inspired. But a 30-minute prayer circle happens once a month. Go ahead and click the link below and get the Zoom link and join us for our next prayer circle. So many opportunities for us to come together as a community and to rise and grow. So until next time, I'm inviting you to lead with purpose, stand with integrity, and mobilize with impact. And remember, optimism is a force multiplier.