What Your Team Is Really Learning From You: Leadership Lessons That Stick
Lori sent Vonda an article by Tobias Charles — management ideas he still believes after twenty years of leading — and this episode is the two of them working through it out loud, translating each line into what it actually looks like in a small business and a flower shop. It opens with the thought that reframes the rest: I used to believe experience would teach me a pathway for every situation. Instead, it's given me patterns and instincts that guide me through the unfamiliar. Experience doesn't hand you the answer. It hands you a better guess when something new walks in the door.
First, a distinction they've circled before. If you were hiring, would you look for management skills or leadership skills? Vonda picks the leader without hesitating: a leader has the respect and trust of the people working with them, and a manager doesn't automatically get either. Lori agrees — and adds the thing that makes it relevant to every listener. Everyone on a team leads in some direction. This isn't a conversation reserved for whoever is at the top.
Repetition isn't a communication failure
The first principle is one Lori says she talks about constantly: great managers repeat themselves. The line that landed for Vonda was about mistaking repetition for a flaw in her own communication when it's really just human nature on the other side.
They caught themselves doing it minutes before hitting record. Vonda asked where the Trello board was that Ellie had built for them — and Lori had no idea what she meant, because she'd been working in a Google Doc the whole time. It had been agreed once, and five hundred things had happened since. Nobody was wrong; the message just needed saying again.
The practical upgrade: stop asking "do you understand?" and start asking "what did you hear me say?" And remember you have no idea what frame of mind someone was in when you said it. Somebody in that meeting may have left a sick kid at home. It never made it onto a shelf in their brain. Vonda's habit here is recording a quick Loom screencast of how something is done — partly for the person she's showing, partly because she'll forget too.
Clarity, friction, and the flywheel
Most performance problems are clarity problems. Both admit they're better at this with members than internally, where everyone talks all day and assumptions pile up. Lori's recurring example is the photo shoot, where Vonda and Ellie assume she knows the next step and she genuinely doesn't. Their fixes are small and repeatable: sit on the email overnight and reread it, or paste it into ChatGPT and ask whether it makes sense. Lori's standing instruction to herself is "clear and kind."
Then the one that reframes a lot of management: you don't need to add motivation when you can remove the friction. The instinct is to throw an incentive at a problem. Often the real issue is a conversation you've been avoiding — which is exactly what Lori is building her SAF presentation around. Avoid it long enough and you're just letting friction accumulate while hoping a bonus fixes it.
Don't build dependency, build momentum. Vonda's read on Flower Clique is that the team isn't dependent on her; she's watching, listening, and suggesting. Lori's counter is fair — they are dependent on Vonda for the seasonal price changes — but not in the everyday. The related lesson is not to hire people just like you. Vonda names the team one by one and the point is that each brings something she doesn't have.
The flower shop version: get the framework set up so designers pass to the driver, and someone else owns quality and price control before it goes out the door. Get the flywheel spinning, then step back and let momentum carry it — with supervision available when it's needed. Both acknowledge this is where a lot of shop owners struggle, because the business is their whole world and delegating feels like risk.
Boring systems, and the behaviour you're actually rewarding
Lori is refreshingly honest that "exciting outcomes begin in boring systems" is a struggle for her — she doesn't like simple, repeatable, scalable process work. But it isn't about her. The web team thrives on exactly that, and so does Sales Prep School: A, B, C, D, done. Knowing which one you are is its own leadership skill. As she puts it, that's why she was never asked to be on the web team.
Then the pair that stings. What's rewarded gets repeated — and reward isn't only praise. It's what you notice, what you draw attention to, and crucially what you don't address. If someone arrives ten minutes late every day and you say nothing, everyone who showed up on time watched you reward it.
Which leads to the line Vonda highlighted: your team copies what you tolerate, not what you say. Both have had the conversation with owners who won't address a problem because that person might leave — and then what would they do without that designer? Vonda's answer is to run the question forward. What happens to everyone else's behaviour once they see you're serious? Lori's research for her presentation keeps surfacing the same story: an owner who let someone go, or watched them leave, and only then realised that person had been the toxic one all along — often the one who'd been first with the gossip, and trusted because of it.
Trust, curiosity, and leading yourself
You build trust with consistency, not kindness. Neither reads that as permission to be unkind — more that you can't run a business without trusting your people. Lori tells the story of her husband's father, who ran a full-service gas station: the one vacation the family took, the employee he trusted most stole from him. It's why small business owners of that generation didn't take trips.
Trigger your curiosity, not your certainty. When you're completely sure about how a process should go, that's the moment to open your mind — because it's when we've grown too sure of ourselves that mistakes happen. Both flag how hard this is against "we've always done it this way."
And finally, leading yourself matters most. Emotional regulation, and Lori's post-it note: thoughts ain't facts. Vonda's favourite one-liner from the piece is the one about ego — you can't remain curious if you can't handle yours. Everybody has one; the job is checking it now and then.
The article's ending is the part that stayed with them: after more than twenty years in leadership, the author is less certain than he's ever been. Lori's take is that certainty is a scary place to live, and that she can tell within a few minutes of talking to an owner or a manager whether they live there — because it shows up as struggle. The two words they land on are open mind and curiosity. Keep asking whether there's a better way.
Key takeaways
- Repeating yourself isn't a failure of communication — ask "what did you hear me say?" instead of "do you understand?"
- Before you call it a performance problem, check whether you were actually clear.
- Remove the friction before you add the incentive. Often the friction is a conversation you're avoiding.
- Build systems and momentum, not dependency — and hire people whose strengths aren't yours.
- Your team copies what you tolerate. Silence on the person who's late every day is a reward everyone else can see.
- When you're most certain, get curious. Check the ego, regulate the emotion, and keep asking if there's a better way.