Belief in Others - Empowering or Controlling?

Why do some leaders empower their teams to thrive while others fall into the trap of micromanagement?

The answer often lies in a fundamental trait: belief in others. In this episode of Leadership Traits Decoded, Cynthia Kyriazis and Drea Martin explore how a leader’s capacity to trust in their team’s abilities creates a foundation for empowerment or dysfunction.

They discuss the delicate balance between accountability and belief, revealing how these traits work in tandem to create effective leadership. 

Too little belief in others can turn leaders controlling rather than empowering, while excessive belief may create blind spots. The conversation also examines whether leadership behaviors cascade through organizations and how emotional intelligence plays a pivotal role in breaking negative cycles.

You’ll Learn:

• Why too little belief in others makes leaders controlling rather than empowering
•  How low belief can prevent leaders from seeing employees’ full potential
•  Why addressing this trait often requires direct conversation and developmental planning
•  How leaders may unconsciously perpetuate patterns from their own managers
•  How emotional intelligence helps break negative leadership cycles
•  The difference between empathy (shared experience) and compassion (intellectual understanding) in leadership contexts
•  Why both empathy and compassion are critical for developing effective leaders. 

Whether you’re reflecting on your own leadership style or working to build empowered, high-performing teams, this episode offers practical insights on balancing trust, accountability, and growth. 

Ready to explore your leadership traits? Connect with us on LinkedIn or visit www.plllab.com to see how we transform leadership intelligence into return-driven action.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introducing Leadership Traits Decoded
• 1:17 Belief in Others vs. Drive Accountability
• 2:18 Impacts of Low Belief in Others
• 5:20 Leadership Modeling and Emotional Intelligence
• 9:15 Empathy vs Compassion in Leadership
• 10:53 Key Takeaways and Episode Closing

Transcript

Cynthia Kyriazis: 0:03

Welcome to Leadership Traits Decoded. I'm Cynthia Kyriazis, Chief Experience Officer at the Culture Think Tank.

Drea Martin: 0:10

And I'm Drea Martin, Chief Operating Officer of the Crucible. We are collaborative partners at Performance Leadership Learning Lab, where we transform leadership intelligence into return-driven action.

Cynthia Kyriazis: 0:22

Today, we're unpacking the leadership traits essential for building, investing in and scaling successful companies. Our insights come directly from data-driven metrics within our platform's solution, so let's dive in.

Drea Martin: 0:37

Hello Good afternoon.

Cynthia Kyriazis: 0:37

Andrea Hi, how are you? Yeah?

Drea Martin: 0:39

doing well. How are you?

Cynthia Kyriazis: 0:41

Good, how was your?

Drea Martin: 0:42

bike ride oh wonderful.

Cynthia Kyriazis: 0:43

Yeah, nice day for it. Nice day for it, beautiful. I was looking over our traits list, of which we have many things, and I came across one that I felt and you could kind of confirmed with me that the one I thought would be good with the one we did previously, which was drive accountability, yes, the next trait that I thought we might pursue is belief in others. That sounds perfect. You think that works? That's a good follow-up. Okay, because I can see the one is definitely related to the other.

Drea Martin: 1:14

Yeah, and it's very common actually, whenever I see a report where there's too much belief in others which that is one of those traits where you can have too much just because trusting in the ability of others is something that can be a blind spot I like to then kind of scroll back and report back up to leadership and look at their drives accountability level, because that's such a helpful indicator of do they have the healthy safeguards to make sure that they are not blindly trusting, but rather just holding a healthy level of confidence in others?

Cynthia Kyriazis: 1:45

not blindly trusting, but rather just holding a healthy level of confidence in others. Oh, that's interesting. That's really good, because I'm sure that both of us, as well as our listeners, have seen those who have belief in others that may have a blind spot, and others who don't believe in others, which is a completely different blind spot, so to speak. That's a great observation, cool. I ask this all the time just because I think it helps frame for a high-performing individual. How are they challenged with that? What does it look like and what is the outcome of that, of not having belief in others or a strong propensity for it?

Drea Martin: 2:18

Yeah, it's a good question. So that opposite negative, right? So too low belief in others, meaning that they're inhibited by not having enough of it, just to make sure, cool, yeah. So I think a tough part with having super low belief in others is that you can come across as maybe more controlling instead of empowering. If there is a strong lack of trust and just belief that other people are capable and doing their best work, that can lead to some interdynamics there that are complicated. I think it's also tough sometimes people might not see other people's potential as much. If they have super low belief in others, there's a chance they'll be limited a little bit in their scope of what they look for, and there's other things that play into this, of course. But it's interesting how much kind of this one attribute contributes to those potential perspectives if it is an area you have way too low of. What about your experience? Is there anything else you'd add from a leader who has too low belief in others and is challenged by that?

Cynthia Kyriazis: 3:13

I have seen it in the past and I understand what you're saying, what you're talking about.

Cynthia Kyriazis: 3:16

I see the residuals of that in the employee that they are trying to supervise and the employee that they are supervising and having not as strong a belief in others as they should. My feeling is somebody needs to sit down one-on-one and have a conversation with the leader. That could be the person receiving the information, or the leader's boss, so to speak. But if you recognize the behavior and the behavior needs to be addressed because it is damaging to them in terms of their own growth as a supervisor or a manager, as well as to the person who's on the receiving end I really think that it's one of those things where we sit down and we communicate a developmental plan around understanding what it is, why it's important to change that, or to move towards changing that belief and then actually enabling them to practice that. They just may not even be aware of that. Yeah, sometimes it's a control thing, but sometimes the message they send is they don't get it, as the recipient is receiving it the same way.

Drea Martin: 4:16

And that disconnect is tough because there's definitely situations where that's more prevalent than others. If you're a leader who is overseeing other people and responsible for coaching and developing others, then having that necessary level of belief in them is important so that there's a healthy relationship there, so that you want to put and invest that time and energy into their development, while I'm sure there's other roles and we've run into this where maybe someone's in less of an influential leadership position and there's less of an emphasis on development as a whole, and in that case sometimes a lower level of belief in others can mean that you're making sure that things that are important are handled directly by you and while delegation's important, sometimes things get done better if it's that one person driving things forward. It's funny how it's dependent too, on situations in terms of what the level of issue or problem this would cause on an organization would be.

Cynthia Kyriazis: 5:12

I guess we always have to take a step back and say what is the impact of this if it doesn't get addressed or get fixed or get noticed or get acknowledged or whatever that action is required? But as you were talking, something came up to me I hope I'm not putting you on the spot when I asked this question, because it just popped in my head when you were speaking. If the individual is receiving the information, that individual that's receiving it before they got the information. Do you think that if they are treated that way, they treat their supervised individuals that way? Does it go down the ladder?

Drea Martin: 5:47

That's a great question and something actually that I think about, especially in a growing organization, just understanding like how I'm managed, how I manage up and then, as our team grows, how I want to bring people in and kind of the responsibilities I want to put on their plate. It's something I think about often just in my own experience as well, as kind of seeing this interdynamics. I think it depends on the individual and the level to which they feel that that is kind of the maybe rite of passage or necessary step of I was treated this way and therefore the people below me must be treated this way too, to show that they have a thick skin and they can put up with it. Versus another level of maybe a little bit more emotional intelligence or maturity or maybe a little more empathy with the situation to say I recognize that maybe that individual might say I'm not managed by someone who has strong belief in others and that's a situation that I'm working on. But then take that introspection to say how do I not bring this to the people I supervise and how do I make sure I'm still developing those skills?

Drea Martin: 6:48

And that's an interesting, just kind of step that they have to take. As an individual, I'd say, to kind of make that decision and decide what they pass on and what they don't. It makes me think about Greek life hazing. Actually, when I was talking about rite of passage, I'm like we went through it so everyone else has to too, right, and that's a negative thing. It's not. It's not a. It is frowned upon.

Cynthia Kyriazis: 7:10

Yes, correct. Well, I mean, you brought up emotional intelligence and we have not spoken of that in depth. We've skirted. We've mentioned it several times, because emotional intelligence is one of the most important things to developing your staff and developing those that work with you and for you and yourself. I want to take a little minor step back and say that during the pandemic, there was a lot, a lot of written information and posts and meetings and all this information about how much more empathy managers were expected to have and what I learned because their staff was suffering. They were in a situation, all of them, that we had never faced before.

Cynthia Kyriazis: 7:53

In my training, I have learned that there is a definition for empathy and a definition for compassion, and I don't know if individuals think of it that way. A coach would think of it. Somebody who's been coached for a while would understand is the ability to understand somebody else's situation because you have experienced something similar on your own, without putting all of your eggs on them, with all the basket of stuff that happened to you. You understand it because it happened to you or something similar happened to you, so the depth of that could ring deeper and you may have more ability to pay attention to that or understand that when somebody says, hey, belief in others is an important trait and it's something you can develop, but we don't all have it. Compassion, on the other hand which is what I saw more of the word for during that compassion is you may not have experienced anything similar to what this individual is going through, for whatever reason, but you can intellectually understand and put yourself in their shoes to the degree of understanding why it is causing pain, why it is causing problems for them, why it is causing problems within the team or the organization. It's the ability to take a bit of a step back because you don't understand it, but to frame of mind, reset it, to put it in a language that you understand for them.

Cynthia Kyriazis: 9:07

And if that's true, if compassion is something that does need to be shown, yes, I think it needs to be shown more importantly, everywhere, anytime you're dealing with another person. You don't want to always have the same experiences, but we could have compassion for them. That's important for them, the recipient of that compassion, to understand so that they can move forward with their family, with their career, with their boss, with their team. Somebody showed some compassion around it and said, hey, here's two things we can do, or three things we can do so that they're not feeling hopeless, so to speak. We don't want anybody to feel hopeless. There's something we can do for everyone. Thank you for those insights, drea. If I said what is the one takeaway? I've had so many, now I have to think of one. What's the one takeaway that you see?

Drea Martin: 9:47

Good question. Coming back to, I'm really grateful that you defined and walked through empathy in comparison to compassion as well, and how both of those might be relevant in that situation, maybe in different ways. So I think it's important to think about that, depending on the person's experience and if they can relate or share an understanding for that situation more personally, situation more personally, find compassion around in order to decide to change or not to change and to support or not to support. In a certain way, that's interesting. Yeah, I think that's probably my biggest takeaway is kind of pulling those apart a little bit more and thinking about the difference there. So it's fun to hear about your coaching insights.

Cynthia Kyriazis: 10:23

I think my takeaway is when you said that it can be the behavior can be more controlling than empowering to enable people to do their best work, I think it is going to take somebody who can have a bit of emotional intelligence and step back and ask themselves is this a control thing with me, or do I need to put some compassion into what's happening with this person who's affecting other people on the team and help them develop through that for a better future? I like that Wonderful. Thank you, ma'am, appreciate all the information and I'll see you next time. Sounds great. Thanks for listening to this episode of Leadership Traits Decoded. You'll be able to find all our episodes on the Performance Leadership Learning Lab website at wwwplllabcom or you can listen on your favorite streaming platform.

Drea Martin: 11:11

We'll be back soon to explore the next essential trait. Until then, feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn if you have any questions or ideas.