Leading Through Uncertainty Without Losing the Room | Ep 20
What is the difference between being in charge and being a true leader? How can you create a culture of calm during change within the office? Can you learn to lead with your heart and use emotional well-being and steady leadership skills in times of crisis?
In this podcast episode, Jennifer Froemel speaks about how to lead through uncertainty without losing the room.
In This Podcast:
What it means to be a leader
Acknowledging uncertainty as a leader
Soft landing for change
Reflecting on control versus steadiness
What it means to be a leader
When changes appear [in the workspace], our response sets the emotional tone for everyone else.
Jennifer Froemel
It is important to lead by example because it truly sets the tone for how everyone else will follow along and handle the situation. They learn from you.
You are their guiding light for how to respond.
Acknowledging uncertainty as a leader
Be transparent with your staff, wherever necessary and helpful, because it encourages trust and helps you to stick to your morals and values professionally.
Being transparent also means acknowledging when you don’t know something, too. It builds trust even more if you can admit when you are unsure yourself and are open to advice or suggestions.
That really helped us because we were working together … When I am leading and things feel uncertain, I acknowledge the changes, I acknowledge the uncertainty, and I say, “You know what, what can we do right now?”
Jennifer Froemel
Soft landing for change
Ease the transitions wherever necessary by prepping and teaching your staff with what they need to know to function without your help all the time.
Provide additional emotional support if it is needed by your staff during times of change.
Reflecting on control versus steadiness
I really want you to recognize the value that you have in your leadership roles … We held the system together, and we all were able to still connect, even though times were uncertain.
Jennifer Froemel
Where in your work or life are you trying to force control, rather than guiding others through steadiness?
Our natural instinct is indeed to slink away from change, but by being aware of that and taking action is the answer to navigating and directing the change towards your goals.
Change can be scary, but it doesn’t have to be. The Fear of Change podcast is all about helping you embrace change and live a more fulfilling life. Hosted by Jennifer Froemel, LCPC, a therapist with nearly 30 years of experience, we cover topics like mental wellness, holistic health, and improving relationships.
Jennifer’s down-to-earth approach makes it easy to understand why we fear change and how to move past those fears. Whether you’re dealing with anxiety, relationship issues, or just feeling stuck, there’s something here for you.
Podcast Transcription
Jennifer Froemel 00:00:00 The Fear of Change podcast is part of the practice of the Practice Network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like the Sensitive in Nature podcast, go to practice of the Practice Network. Welcome to the Fear of Change podcast. I’m your host, Jennifer Cromwell, a therapist dedicated to helping you challenge your perspective. See, fear is only one option and discover that finding yourself is a lot of work, but totally worth it. In each episode will explore the depths of change, uncovering strategies to embrace it with confidence and resilience. So get ready to embark on a journey of self-discovery and transformation. Let’s face our fears together and find the courage to create the life we truly desire. Thank you for joining me. Hello everyone. I am Jennifer Brummel, your host, and welcome back to the Fear of Change podcast. Well, today we are really going to go through talking about how this next series is really going to be helping us as we’re in managing change and uncertainty and really just ensuring that everybody is aware of the difficulties that show up and that we are all in it together.
Jennifer Froemel 00:01:39 Because at the end of the day, I mean, really ground is shifting. It has been shifting and helping to manage change and keeping our people grounded is so important. Whether you are a teacher, a scout leader, a business owner, a supervisor, Revisar. It doesn’t matter a parent, right? You are a leader. And in that way, it’s so important to recognize how we can lead in uncertain times without losing the room, without losing our people, without losing our minds. So there’s there’s really a difference, I think, between being in charge and being a stabilizing presence. And when change shows up, whether it’s a staff transition, a new policy, an unexpected disruption, our response sets the emotional tone for everyone else. And I was definitely reminded of this during Covid, which I’ll get into in a minute. But more recently, I was talking with a colleague of mine and we were doing a little bit of consulting. And one of the comments that I had made was how I struggle sometimes with my my morning kind of getting away from me.
Jennifer Froemel 00:03:03 And he asked the question, well, why is that? And I simply said, well, you know, I check my email, I’m checking my text messages and, and then sometimes I might get caught up in it. And he asked this fateful question that just changed everything he said. So is your business that fragile? That if you don’t respond right this minute, everything will fall apart? And I was like, no. Are you crazy? No. I mean, maybe back in the day it was. But no, not right now. And that, like, slapped me in the forehead. and I immediately started to think about, what am I doing? How am I leading? How am I showing up for myself or my people? And I have to tell you, I really, really, really changed. I started to look at ways in which that if I decide at 9:00 at night that I want to send an email and it’s not an urgent situation. I really was like, I want to know, how do I do that? Because I just because I want it off my planner doesn’t necessarily mean that I want my people to be, you know, reading it right now.
Jennifer Froemel 00:04:24 You know, and so what I, what I recognized is that I want to, you know, kind of lead by example. And I want to create a culture of calm. You know, in the profession of counseling and, and therapist world stuff. The reality is, is, you know, there’s some degree of of being on. Right? If we are working in a setting where, you know, maybe I’ve gotten home at 5 p.m., but my staff are working until 9 p.m. and it doesn’t matter. Am I working in a hospital setting? Am I working in an outpatient setting? Am I? Am I working in a school setting? The reality is, none of those none of those things matter in terms of being able to discern, you know, which one is more important, because the reality is they’re all important. And why? Because we’re dealing with human lives. So as counselors and therapists, I don’t really know how many people recognize just how much we are accessible as clinicians and available to people because we are.
Jennifer Froemel 00:05:33 for example, the other day I was taking my daughters to a doctor’s appointment and I got a call from a staff member who had someone who was clearly having a really bad manic episode, had not slept in days, and was starting to be very paranoid. And guys, while I was on the road, I handled it all and I did come into my home office and pull up the patient information as I proceeded to call 911. And I didn’t skip a beat. My kids got in the car. We started driving. I had my headphones on so I wasn’t spilling HIPAA information all over the place. And we managed it. All right, then, in that moment and honestly and truthfully, afterwards, my daughters didn’t even notice. We didn’t even talk about it. I just started asking questions about how school was, because for me, it’s so normal to have that kind of interruption. Now, obviously, not everybody is in that same space and not everybody wants a job like that, right? But as clinicians, sometimes these things show up.
Jennifer Froemel 00:06:47 And again, given that I’m a practice owner and I have multiple multiple employees, this definitely shows up and I’m used to it. So what I want to talk about today is the real example of Covid and what happened in that time. As a business owner, as a provider of service to humans. What happened in that time was, you know, again, I think everybody remembers their lives were turned upside down. And I just knew that we had to figure a way to keep everybody safe. And knowing that being seen in the office was really not an option because I couldn’t get my hands on masks. And so without me having masks, I knew that we had to stop seeing people in person, and that meant that I had to have a whole plethora of policy kind of around things. But the bigger thing was, is we had only at that time had four lines, HIPAA protected lines. We had had Mom and pop shop that we had partnered with out of North Carolina. And I got them to have, you know, four of those lines.
Jennifer Froemel 00:08:05 But because of Covid, I was like, can you guys create? And I, like, paused, you know, 18 lines between tonight and tomorrow morning. And they were like, yeah, we can. So they did, thank goodness. And then that next morning I had to train everybody how to use it, because previously we only had four lines and nobody else knew how to do it. zoom at that time for me was just out of the question. There’s too many of us. we were, like, 22 at the time. too many of us. And too expensive. so. So the next morning, we got off to a start, and I had quite a few people that were absolute naysayers when it came to the idea of seeing people not in person, and I had to be very specific and diligent to say, listen, I get it. I prefer in person as well, but we are not prepared. I don’t have tons of hand sanitizer. Hand sanitizer is hard to come by right now.
Jennifer Froemel 00:09:16 I don’t have masks. Masks are hard to come by right now, and we weren’t cleaning the offices every day after we had people leave. And again, we offer up like water and tea. And, you know, how could we do this when nobody knows what’s going to happen next? And we’re not a hospital facility. So what what happened at that time, too, was that our staff were saying, oh my God, Jennifer, how long is this going to last? And like everybody else on the planet, I said, I have no idea. And in that moment, I had to remember that, you know, not knowing. Didn’t mean I was failing them. Not knowing just simply meant that I, like everybody else, did not know. But the biggest, most important thing to me was that we, as providers, were able to still be serving the people that we needed to serve. And especially now in a time where things were so uncertain. And we did. And everybody that next morning, even the ones that were really not wanting to do telehealth or, you know, television, you know, tell tele based services, even though we were in that space, everybody recognized, you know what? This isn’t what any of us want right now.
Jennifer Froemel 00:10:45 But the biggest thing is, is that we can continue to move forward. The other thing was, is our billing. You know, telehealth was not something that was allowed for all insurance companies. These. And so again, the reason why we only had four of those lines. So what I recognized was that I had to do something in terms of creating some new code sheets for people so they they could access them. And, and so I did, you know, and it made me recognize that in that moment, the more I was staying calm, the more I was staying clear that, like, I can only do what I can do. And when something comes up, we can address it. And when something shows up, we can address it. And again, the idea, well, Jennifer, what happens if someone seems suicidal or someone seems homicidal or someone is paranoid? What do we do? And I said, these are all excellent questions and ones in which we will identify how can we manage and what do we need to do to support everybody.
Jennifer Froemel 00:11:57 And in that minute, like, I felt like I wanted to really break down a lot of things. I wanted to overexplain. Or in some cases, I really wanted to hide because it was just it was a lot. It was a lot of overwhelming sensation. And what I found myself saying is, here’s what we know right now and here’s what we’re working through. I said things like, let’s pause, let’s gather this. You know our thoughts, and let’s determine what do we know and what’s the next steps in the direction of of movement. Where do we go. How do we move there. And then from there, I felt like it was so important as a leader that I acknowledged regularly how uncomfortable things were. And normally as a company, we would come together twice a month for meetings. And I bumped that up to weekly because things were changing so rapidly. And I felt like people just needed a space in which to communicate. They needed a space to, you know, talk without losing themselves.
Jennifer Froemel 00:13:12 So in that way, I started to recognize that I was protecting the stability of our work. I was protecting the stability of our service to clients and simultaneously protecting the stability within ourselves. So I really realize now in, in retrospect, all of these things were happening simultaneously. And again, the idea of not knowing, while oftentimes is, is definitely ascertained to mean you don’t know and you’re not a good boss, you’re not a good leader. What it came to mean for me was I. I can’t rush to fix everything. It meant that I could create structure. But if I tried to, like, rush through it, it was going to be worse. And the more that I seemed levelheaded and logical, the more everyone else stayed levelheaded and logical. So I realized that when we were looking at how the transitions were happening to telehealth from in person and recognize, like the behind the scenes things that were happening, I was recognizing in our meetings with clinicians the need for us to share with clients the things that we’re trying to do, the things that we’re utilizing in the way of creating stability with intention.
Jennifer Froemel 00:14:51 So in a way, my leadership style Was kind of trickling down to the clients. The clients were learning what we were doing and and then vice versa. You know, we we would hear from clients, oh, hey, you know, because they were in leadership positions themselves in some cases. So we would find out different ways from the clients of how can we get more hand sanitizer. How can we get masks and things like that? So that really, really helped us because we were really working together. And what I have done since then is when I am leading and things feel uncertain, I acknowledge the changes. I acknowledge the uncertainty and I say, you know what? What can we do right now? Right. So as some changes come down the pike, I want to offer up resources. Resources to serve our clients and resources to support our clinicians. And guess what? Sometimes it could feel like we’re actually supporting clients when we’re supporting our staff. Right. Or customers, you know, whatever you call the people that that that get things from you and your role and and so really that idea of introducing the changes slowly, unless of course, you know, I mean, safety is at risk, right? I mean, when you when you think about any, any kind of crisis situation, earthquakes, tornadoes, you know, hurricanes, any of those things, we really we have to move quickly.
Jennifer Froemel 00:16:34 And quite frankly, we know that in those times, as long as we’re there, we’re a plentiful people. There’s a lot of us. we actually know that the trauma levels, are likely to not be as huge as if when we are alone with something scary. so that’s just kind of an aside. Side. But but the idea of introducing change slowly unless safety is at risk. So as a leader, it’s almost like just asking yourself, like, is anyone at risk in this very moment? And if the answer is no, then the answer is no, and we can forge ahead. The last piece that I want to talk about or actually, I think, yeah, this is the last piece I want to talk about, is how do we have kind of like a soft landing for those that are looking up to us, for those that are looking to us for change and transition? And honestly, a big piece to this is giving them the breakdown of what it is we’re doing. So again, I go back to those Covid times right in the very beginning, I taught them what is the tool we’re using for telehealth.
Jennifer Froemel 00:17:52 We went over, Her, you know what? What we needed to do and and, like the differential. We trained everybody on etiquette for telehealth services. You know, don’t be laying in your bed, you know, don’t have the camera looking up your nostrils. Still dress appropriate. You know, we were like, you know, business on the top, party on the bottom, whatever you want to do. but make sure you had something on the bottom, because if you had to get up because your dog started barking, right? Which normally in the office, your dog’s not barking. so make sure that you have pants on. but really then from there was was checking in with people, checking in with their emotional experience, not just the logistics. Right, guys? How are you feeling about this? You know, I know I’m feeling a little off, but I know it’s really hard because everybody is in your home right now. You know, in my case, I had three kids that were either doing junior high work or high school work initially.
Jennifer Froemel 00:18:54 my husband was working from home as well, and so we each had to find a space and we each had to have access to internet, right? so I, I got very real with people, you know, they’d start complaining about things that were happening and I would share with them what’s happening in my home. so that way, then again, we’re not feeling alone. Like I said, with, you know, things like nine over 11 happening and, you know, hurricanes and things like that. When they’re, you’re surrounded by more people, the system can come together. So I want to, you know, end here in just identifying the, you know, and leaving you with a, with a quote that we don’t just hold the system together. We hold the people inside the system. We hold the people inside the system. I said it again. I really want you to recognize the value you have in your leadership roles. And again, you know, my my scout, you know, population was quite large before Covid and now we’re we’re a third of the size that we were, but we kept it together during Covid until we could have outside meetings.
Jennifer Froemel 00:20:24 Meaning outside, outside in the grass. so people weren’t closed up and at risk of transmitting Covid to each other. so we really held the system together. We all were able to still connect with each other even though times were uncertain. so I’m going to ask you all just to reflect on this. Where in your work or life Are you trying to force control? Rather than guide through steadiness. You know, just where might that be? Where in your work or life are you trying to force control? Rather than guide through steadiness. You know, all of this is about change. And we all know that our natural instinct is, in fact, to slink away from it. So again, where does that show up for you? Because we know that forcing control, rather than guiding with steadiness will only sink your ship faster. Right. I think of the Titanic. So on that note, I thank you so much for joining me today. And if you have any questions, if you have any desire to connect deeper with a broader community.
Jennifer Froemel 00:21:53 If you have any feedback in terms of things that you would like to hear in the podcast, please be sure to go to the Fear of Change podcast and go to our info page and either subscribe there or put in your, you know, your ideas. We’d love to serve you as much as we possibly can and be as helpful as possible. And so next time in our following episode related to this idea of how we lead through uncertain times, we are going to take a deep dive into what I’ve been referring to as the Empowered Know. Thank you all so much, and be kind to yourselves and know that you are worth it. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Fear of Change podcast. I hope you found today’s discussion enlightening and empowering. Remember, change is inevitable, but how we respond to it is what truly matters. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review and share it with others who might benefit from our conversations. Join me next time as we continue to explore new ways to handle change and live our best lives.
Jennifer Froemel 00:23:17 Until then, I’m Jennifer Brummel, encouraging you to. Face your fears and embrace the journey of self-discovery. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with understanding that neither the host, the publisher or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical or any other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.
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