76: Leadership, Relationships, and Finding Your True Calling: A Conversation with Sophie Hudson

Beyond the Title: Building Leaders Others WANT to Follow with Sophie Hudson

Effective leadership goes beyond a job title.

It’s about creating connections, fostering growth, and building environments where people thrive.

In a world where challenging leadership experiences often emerge in the workplace, contrasted with the positive examples found in personal relationships, Aaron and Sophie explored this disparity in Episode 76. Sophie suggested that workplace issues can arise when individuals in positions of power might lack emotional intelligence or readiness for their role, creating a “bad cocktail” where insecurity or a misunderstanding of leadership takes hold.

“Effective leadership isn’t about barking orders or solely relying on positional authority,” Sophie adds. Her experience with a former boss, Sean, showed that strong emotional intelligence and focus on relationship and service made him a leader she genuinely enjoyed working with. When the emphasis shifts from power dynamics to relationships and service, it becomes “really hard to boss people around if they don’t believe that you care about them”.

“The idea of prioritizing relationships might feel counter to so many of us,” Aaron noted. Neuro-theologian Dr. James Wilder understands that our brains process information relationally, first, and then information. Walking into a situation where you’re immediately bombarded with information or demands can prevent the relational side from opening up.

Sophie recounted her early teaching years, where she focused heavily on control and a “magazine of classroom policies and procedures”. She learned that being curious about her students, asking questions, and paying attention ultimately “served a way greater good” and was far more effective long-term. She shifted her focus to simple principles: “just be a kind human. Don’t be disruptive, and let’s believe the best about one another”. With the relationship established, an effective dynamic naturally developed. As she put it, “unless we’re willing in whatever our leadership capacities are… to go into that thing with the relational component… [people] are not gonna engage in a way maybe that we would think is what we’re after, unless they get that relational component”.

Developing Relational Impact

This fundamental principle is captured by the Relational Impact tool. This tool reminds us that the key to having an impact on people is to put relationship before opportunity.

This means sitting down, listening, asking questions, showing genuine interest, and demonstrating that you are “for them,” fighting for their highest possible good. By understanding their reality and “felt need” first, you build trust and become significant, which naturally creates opportunities to offer solutions.

Putting yourself first and jumping straight to offering solutions often leads to missing their true pain and needs.

Know Yourself to Lead Yourself: Understanding Through Frameworks

Understanding ourselves and others is critical for effective leadership. Aaron walked Sophie through the 5 Voices, a framework to elaborate on communication styles. This framework describes five communication tendencies, noting that everyone possesses aspects of all five, but typically has natural strengths and areas for growth.

The 5 Voices are:

Nurturer: Caretakers, people-first, warm and relational.
Creative: Idealists who envision or value ideas for improvement and see many possibilities.
Guardian: Truth-tellers, question-askers, focused on systems, process, details, and organization.
Connector: Master networkers who know and connect people.
Pioneer: Trailblazers who see a vision and drive to achieve a specific future.

Sophie identified strongly with the Connector Voice, loving to connect people, and also saw the Creative in herself, loving to think about possibilities, though “not the least bit interested in executing them”.

Looking back on her career, she reflected that early in her teaching career, she tried to operate more like a Guardian with a “magazine of rules.”

Operating outside one’s natural bent can be a “specific kind of misery”. Sophie stated, “it’s so important, I think, for people in leadership to see when somebody is outside of their wheelhouse… and help create changes”.

Recognizing these different “voices” and working to understand various vantage points helps teams and leaders collaborate effectively and achieve more together. This aligns with the LRN value “Open Hands,” stating, “Together we can shatter boundaries and help one another thrive”.

Take the 5 Voices

Cultivating Thriving Cultures Through Affirmation

The conversation also touched on the unique challenges faced by young women in leadership and the crucial role of affirmation. Sophie noted that women can sometimes encounter different expectations or “secret handshakes” in the workplace.

The toll of unhealthy work environments is significant, chipping away at a person’s peace, confidence, and sense of who they are, affecting them emotionally and spiritually. Sophie advised young women to find ways to continually affirm their value as leaders, look for places that are healthy and value their gifts, and recognize that they don’t have to stay in environments that diminish them. “When an opportunity chips away at your peace, at your confidence, at your sense of who you are and who you were made to be,” she says, “I don’t think you have to stay there”.

This resonates with LRN’s mission of equipping growing companies to create bigger futures and build thriving cultures and the value of Liberation as a Lifestyle, fighting for the highest possible good wherever we are. The aim is to help organizations cultivate environments where people are empowered.

Sophie emphasized the powerful impact of naming and calling out the gifts and strengths we see in others, particularly in younger generations. She shared a moving example of writing a letter to a friend’s daughter after seeing her “light up from the inside out”. This intentional act of affirmation can be “confirming something they maybe have questioned about themselves”. As she puts it, “I think if we will name it, if we will name it for the people who are younger than we are… I just don’t think we can overestimate the impact that that could have”. This act of being seen is “at the heart of what spoke to me so much… It’s the power of being seen”.

Ultimately, building leaders worth following requires intentionality, a focus on genuine relationships, deep self-awareness, and a commitment to seeing and developing the potential in ourselves and others.

Actionable Next Steps to Apply These Principles:

Reflecting on these insights, consider how you can apply them in your own leadership journey and influence the culture around you:

Reflect on your own leadership experiences: Think about the leaders who have been good examples and those who have been challenging. What made the difference? What did you learn about what makes a leader “worth following”?
Identify your natural tendencies: Explore frameworks like the 5 Voices to gain greater self-awareness about your communication and leadership style. How does your natural “voice” influence your interactions and leadership?
Practice Relational Impact: In your daily interactions, intentionally put relationship before task or opportunity. Take the time to listen, ask genuine questions, and show that you are “for them.”

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