The Secret Sauce to Leadership: Confidence, Mistakes, and Nikki Little’s Hot Takes
lisatarkingtonSo often, we believe that confidence means being certain all the time. But what if confidence also meant admitting when we’re unsure and being open to learning? What if we led with empathy and transparency, even when it’s uncomfortable? In this episode, we discuss with Nikki Little, Senior VP and co-owner of Franco, how to show up as a confident leader without losing sight of our humanity.
Continue to read on for the key points of this conversation with Nikki!
Meet Guest, Nikki Little
Lisa: All right, everybody, I am so thrilled to welcome our guest for today, which is Nikki little, the Senior VP and co owner of Franco. Nikki, welcome to The Confident Podcast. I am so freaking pumped to chat today.
Nikki: Me too. Thank you. This is a favorite topic of mine. So I was very excited when you reached out about joining you.
Lisa: It’s going to be so fun. So I guess let’s start by, so a lot of our guests probably don’t know who you are and a little bit of your background. So tell us where kind of like your journey has led you to be really focused on leadership and communications.
Nikki: Yes, so going back to college, I went to Central University, Fire Up Chips. They have an amazing integrative PR program there. So I went through that program, got my degree, got lucky to get a job right after I graduated, which actually happened to be at Franco. So I started my career at Franco in January of 2007, the same year that Twitter launched. So quickly became very infatuated and obsessed with social media and understanding how it would impact PR in the communications industry. So I spent a little over three years at Franco. And at that time, understandably so, a lot of clients were hesitant to use social media. They didn’t understand it. They weren’t ready to invest in it.
So I was starting to get a little restless and wanted to experiment with social media a little more. So I had the opportunity to go to another local agency where they were building a social media practice within the agency. So I was the second person that came on board there to the social media team, spent almost eight years there, was the social media director there by the time I left. And at that point, I had spent almost 11 years in agency. I did internships in college and agency. So that was the only experience I ever had. And I wanted to try something different. So I ended up going in-house at what at that time was a startup. They did events and workshops for financial advisors.
I was their first communications director. So I took everything that I had learned from my time at Franco and at the other agency and really came in with this very well-rounded integrated communications experience. So I helped them get a lot of things aligned in an order where the sales team was doing one thing, the marketing team was doing another thing. So I kind of brought my communications background of let’s integrate and align everything that you’re doing. So I did that for almost two years. And from my time at Franco, I had stayed in close contact with our now CEO, Tina Kozak.
Lisa: Many of my clients will say like, I want to be strategic. I want to be a better leader. I want to have more confidence in my team, but they can’t let go, right? And I tell anybody in that situation, cause I’m still in those situations sometimes, it’s like, it is uncomfortable. Yes, it’s so uncomfortable. And I always tell people that in order to get to where you want, you have to be okay with that piece. Cause that’s the only time to learn.
Nikki: Right. And you have to be okay with making mistakes yourself and you have to be okay with your team members making mistakes. I still struggle with this today
Like my Tina Kozak, our CEO, she’s my manager. And she tells me often, you need to just let people figure it out, right? Like you need to just let- and I’m like, I don’t want them to fail. I don’t want them to make mistakes. If I see this, she’s like, no, no, no. Like you just, you hold back. Right?
I want to save people. I want to help people. I’m a people pleaser, but I have learned that I’ve got to let people figure it out on their own. And of course I would never let something that was critical fall through the cracks, right? But if I’m like, yep, I see that email sitting there. That’s been like 24 hours. You know, I’ve had to really restrain myself from nudging people, poking people. Cause then that turns into micromanagement and then it’s like parenting too. If you’re always saving your children, they’re not going to learn how to be independent and to have autonomy on their own. So they’ve got to figure it out.
Lisa: I’m going to switch a little bit over to another topic that kind of really has to do with leadership and that is vulnerability. And so when is there a time in your life? So like, obviously we have tools, we have things that were like, okay, like as a leader, we’re always working on things, but I also have seen like, where do we find that line when it comes to vulnerability. So when has vulnerability strengthened your leadership?
Nikki:Yes, definitely. Anytime I’ve admitted to making a mistake and been open and honest about that, I can think of a particular time too. And this was about my first year at Franco. And this was when we went virtual, we were in like the heat of the pandemic. And I started to go back to some of those bad habits of not micromanaging so much, but like maybe checking in a little too much and doing what I just explained you should not do. Like an email would come in. It’d be like 10 minutes.
They’d be like, okay, Hey, who’s doing this? And we need to do this because I move at a fast pace. My brain goes fast. I was not giving my team time to even react to anything. So at that time, there were two kind of newer in their career people who went to Tina Kozak and was just like, you got to tell Nikki to chill out. And they knew me so they’re like, I know she’s coming from a good place. I know we are in this unknown of working virtually and doing our best to be the best possible partners to our clients.
Our plans have all just been scrapped. We’re scrambling. We’re creating new plans and strategies because everything that we had outlined is different now. So they knew that I wasn’t coming from a bad place, but they were like, she’s driving us nuts. I appreciated that they talked to Tina about that. Tina talked to me and I was like, Oh yeah, they’re right. You know, but I’m just like, I’m trying to help everyone, you know?
So I was like, I told both of them, we talked, I said, thank you so much. You know, I’m not doing this because I don’t trust you. This is just all unknown to us, but that helped me to slow down, take a step back and let them handle things and trust that if they needed support, they would come to me. I literally have a sticky note at the bottom of my monitor over here that says slow down, slow down. I’ve had this year for years, maybe since that happened actually, because that’s when I make mistakes too. When I move too fast, when I allow my brain to go on overdrive and think about a million things at one time, I start making mistakes.
So it is a conscious effort. It has gotten better over the years. It has definitely helped improve me as a leader and a manager too, but I have to really work at slowing down.
Lisa: The other thing that I think is really important and we, we both know who Brene Brown is, um, and her tagline clear as kind is like chef’s kiss, like love it. It’s super simple. And so when you think about like that clear as kind is like, how do you apply that principle into your leadership and communications?
Nikki: Yeah, it’s exactly what it is, right? It’s not beating around the bush. It’s being, you can balance direct with empathy. You can balance confidence with compassion, but it’s not beating around the bush. It’s not taking five minutes to say something that can be said in one minute, because then people don’t understand what you’re saying. We had a leadership training that we did a couple of years ago, where we got this great feedback from the coach that were you, we were using where she said, don’t sandwich negative feedback in between positive feedback.
Lisa: That’s what I call it. And I think the other thing that kind of comes with that is we, um, and I shared this on a past episode is we care so much, right? We care so much. We want them to also know that we value them for a lot of the great things that they’re doing. But because of communication, people can get lost in the words. And so when you, I would say like had that long winded answer or that, you know, that positive in between or positive over top of the negative, like, what do you fixate on? And what do you really hear? And then if you don’t talk about those things and the feedback that you actually want to give, you’re going to get mad if it happens again, right?Because you weren’t clear in the beginning. Right. And I know from reference for my own life, like I could probably talk really fast when it came to the negative because I just wanted to get it out of this.
I just want to get through it. And they’re like, okay. And then it happened again. And I was like, was I not clear? And I wasn’t. And so these are all things that as leaders, like I always say to employees to give grace to their leaders because a lot of them are learning, but it’s also like feedback both ways. Like I always ask people like, what is the expectation that you have of your leader? And what is the expectation your leader has of you? And if that’s not clear, have that conversation because you should also have expectations of your leader because if they don’t know how to lead you and what you need, they’re going to be doing their style all the time. And then you’re going to get frustrated.
Nikki: Right. Yeah. And then that’s when people quit, right? Like they’re not happy. They’re not getting what they need from their leader, from their manager. The styles don’t connect. And not everybody’s style has to be the same, right? Like we have to learn how to work with people, how to be collaborative with people who have very different work styles, leadership styles. It’s possible.
It’s very possible, but that what comes down to knowing each other, appreciating each other, having those clear, candid, direct conversations, and then working through it when things aren’t going well. Right. Cause I think I mentioned before, if you just sit there and don’t have the conversation, you’re harboring frustration. You’re not feeling good. It reflects in your work. It reflects in your interactions with that person. And that’s not good for anyone.
Lisa: To kind of wrap up, what is one thing that you would leave our audience with today?
Nikki: Oh goodness. You said it already – give yourself grace! Give the teams that you work with, the clients, the customers that you work with – give people grace. This world is crazy, you never know what somebody might be going through. And maybe they’re not comfortable or willing to be vulnerable. You don’t know what’s in the background. That’s another thing I always tell my team members – we don’t always know what people are going through, and somebody might be having a really bad day and we won’t know. Somebody could be sick in their family. They may have received bad health news. Who knows, but let’s always start with giving people grace. And then on the flip side, take that advice yourself. It’s so easy for me to give other people grace, then it’s really hard – so same thing, you have to your number one supporter, you have to care about yourself just as much as you care about the people in your life because if you don’t, that directly impacts leadership. That directly impacts your ability to guide, teach, mentor other people because again – you gotta give yourself that same grace that you’re giving to others.
Lisa: I love that. Awesome. Well Nikki, thank you so much for being on the podcast. So great to chat with you! I love everything about confidence, leadership – but I also, just still my heart, I’m a PR girl from Michigan State and so I totally love chatting with people that are still doing this in their space and being experts. Thank you so much for being on today and to everyone tuning in, we cannot wait to see what you do with your leadership.
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Guest, Nikki Little's Info to Connect
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