How to "F UP" With Tiana Sanchez

In a world of ‘selfies’, ‘me equity’, and millions of people everywhere trying to push their ‘brand’ into the world, Tiana Sanchez is a breath of fresh air. From her coaching and training business, Tiana Sanchez International (named to the Top 15 Executive Coaching Programs of 2018), to the podcast she hosts (Like a REAL BOSS), Tiana is more about supporting others’ success than she is about ‘seeing her name in lights’. Her podcast features such topics as ‘the human side of business’ and ‘servant leadership’; hence my keen interest in interviewing Tiana as a values-based leader!

Like a great many leaders, Tiana was inspired to pursue a career in leadership through a series of great mentors, and not-so-great leaders. One of the latter experiences become very formative for the kind of leader Tiana is today. Tiana spent several years working many industries from retail, food and beverage to the financial industry. At one point, she found herself working for a firm (that shan’t be named), who had their share of complex problems. The CEO led in a way that was detrimental to the team; they led without transparency or integrity. Tiana can still remember thinking, “This is how I don’t want to lead. This is what poor leadership looks like”.

As a direct result of the above experience, Tiana cites transparency as one of the three most important traits that leaders must exhibit. In her experience, leaving out key information leads to mistrust. She highlights Enron as an example of how people felt lied to. The company went so far as to report false numbers, and hid other numbers.

Tiana concedes that leaders sometimes shield employees from information, thinking it’s for the best. In her experience working with teams of all sizes in virtually all industries, people want to know what’s going on. They have a right to know what’s going on. Transparent leadership requires a level of vulnerability, she admits - it’s a risk. It’s a risk, says Sanchez that can pay massive dividends towards earning the trust, buy-in, and respect of your team. For Tiana, her word is everything. “I have to hold myself accountable”. While she admits that transparency may not come easily in her personal life, she sees the benefits daily in her professional life. Sanchez is witness regularly to how valuable it is to share mistakes and lessons with your team of direct reports. This practice humanizes leaders, and builds trust. Like a true servant leader, Sanchez cites that being transparent “helps me to be humble; to take the focus off of me and put it onto others”.

Next on Tiana’s list of the most important traits of great leadership is humility. For Sanchez, when it comes to business, “it’s a ‘we’; not an I.” Across her work as a business and executive coach, Tiana finds that great leaders are great at deflecting credit. She notes that great leaders are far more likely to respond, “we have a fantastic team”, rather than “I put in a lot of hard work” when it comes to accepting credit and accolades.

Rounding out the trifecta of Tiana’s most important leadership attributes is integrity. As Tiana puts it, “your word is bond”. Great leaders back up what they say with what they do. In short, Tiana challenges leaders to live up to their core values.

Though perhaps not among her top three leadership attributes, Tiana adds that great leaders tend to be great executors – they get s#@& done! In her experience, most top notch leaders tend to be assertive.

When it comes to disruptive change, or the need to innovate, Sanchez finds that the best leaders are “adaptors, not avoiders”. They see the market as changing, as well as what changes are required from themselves, their team, their company or their entire industry. She adds, to weather the storm that is the pace of change today, leaders need to be a “predictor, not a pretender”.

On the meaning of leadership, Tiana says it can mean a lot of different things. Selflessness is one of the first, and most important aspects of leadership to Tiana. Sanchez says that great leaders must be “others-centered”. Leadership is, at its’ core, a people centered role, carrying “lots of human responsibility”. To Tiana, any definition of leadership must contain a degree of business acumen, but the best leaders build business on human relationships.

In her words, though the role of the leader is vital, in the scheme of things, the organization and its’ overall impact becomes “less about the leader, (and) more about the ship”.

So where did all of this wisdom come from? What drew Tiana Sanchez into a career in leadership and coaching leaders to be their best in the first place? Tiana credits her early start working for others. She had her first management experience by the time she was just 17 years old. Tiana explains her professional pedigree as though she “had a ‘seat behind the curtain’ her whole career”. Years later, Sanchez was invited to the strategic planning team in a finance position, where she saw how much actually went into helping to plan a company’s future. These experiences shaped her to want to help people be better at what they do.

Tiana feels that leadership is the catalyst to helping people get better. When asked why leadership is so important today, she is quick to answer that leadership is always important. “(Leadership was) important 100 years ago, but today there is so much ability to influence”. Sanchez points to social media, and so many different platforms are available to anybody today to spread their message. This can be a great thing, but it also means that everyone now has a soapbox.

Tiana admits that leaders can lead without obvious or infectious influence, however that is becoming harder and harder as information (good or bad) is becoming more and more accessible. Sanchez urges that business owners, leaders, and entrepreneurs should be leading with influence in a positive way. A leaders’ impact lasts long after their direct interaction with their teams, and long after they are in that role, advises Tiana. An important point to consider as we head into each interaction with our teams, and families!

Like so many leaders, despite her wisdom, skill, and work ethic, it hasn’t been a straight trajectory to success for Tiana. When asked to speak to the role adversity, and even failure, have played in her success, she (true to form) is quite transparent. Sanchez openly admits that everyone has experienced failure. How you deal with it is what makes all the difference.

Tiana’s adversity started at a very young age, which she admits shapes how you become an adult. Growing up poor, Sanchez moved 17 times before the age of 32. Her father wasn’t in the military, and these weren’t transfers with her parents’ jobs. The family of five lived in motels, a shelter, a one-bedroom apartment, with grandparents that were often situated in gang infested cities. In short, they did what they had to do to get by. In part because of this upbringing, when Tiana turned 16 she knew she needed to take control of her life. She started working at 16, and as mentioned, had worked her way up to a management role just a year later. Looking back, Tiana sees her adversity as a gift, citing that early exposure to failure can shape a persons’ work ethic, resiliency, and many other positive attributes that are needed to be successful.

While it’s not comfortable or pleasant, there is an upside to failure according to Sanchez in that it can teach you and motivate you if you let it. Failure has taught her; guided her. Now Tiana sees failure as a motivator. When faced with adversity she asks, “how can I fail up?” and “what insight can I gain?” If nothing else, after a failed strategy, Tiana’s takeaway is “now I know not to do that!” Sanchez teaches leaders to view setbacks as a moment in time, or an experience. If you say “I am a failure” you take ownership over that, she warns. “We have to be very careful what we say and what we think. It’s a chapter in your book, not the title”, advises Tiana.

When asked to reflect on the greatest challenge facing leaders today, Sanchez summarizes that in her experience, many leaders operate in a very antiquated business model. Everything has changed in the last 20 years, from technology to where and how we work. Some leaders have not changed their style to match the change in the world, in their organization, their teams, or even simply how they communicate.

In one organizational example, the entire leadership team was operating under different set of values and work ethic. Tiana had to facilitate a massive change because the workforce did not operate the way the leaders did. Tiana had to facilitate a massive change due to very low employee engagement scores, because the workforce did not operate the way the leaders did. The workforce was 70% of the organization, so it was up to the leaders (not the team) to change. We must individualize how we lead according to Sanchez, because leadership must be others-centered. In the pursuit of continuous improvement, we often systemize to the point of becoming robotic, and words like “care” no longer belong in many environments. Your people are your biggest asset. They must be your biggest priority.

The biggest challenge facing Tiana in her own leadership presently is building a team while learning to be more transparent (sharing the good, the bad & the ugly). “We didn’t hit our quarterly goals or revenue targets” can be deflating to the team, but because of her values, there is no choice but to lead with transparency. Sometimes she feels like she has to succeed no matter what because of her upbringing, so being real with the numbers when they’re not on target is a great challenge. “You need to F up” has become a family motto (as in fail up, or upwards, by learning). After publishing F’d Up: The UPside of Failure, Tiana learned that your integrity is to be accountable to live by your message. A best-selling author, Tiana also wrote Undefeatable: Conquering Self-Defeat and was a contributing author in the international book Leaders in Pearls: How to be a Change Architect.

Tiana teaches us how we can “F up”, by explaining that there are three possible causes of failure: inaction, distraction (even if distracted by success), or lack of direction (misinformed, uninformed, lack of a roadmap). By identifying where we’ve failed, we know what to fix, and so we can ‘F up’ and turn failure into forward momentum!

Looking back, if Tiana could give her 10-year younger self advice, it would be that this too shall pass. In the moment, troubles always seem bigger than they are. Tiana advises not to dismiss the feelings, but also to remember that ‘this too shall pass’.

Amen Tiana, sage advice that when disaster strikes, we can remember that this is merely a moment in time, and we have the opportunity to ‘F Up!’