50 Six Systems for Effective Leadership

🎉 Episode 50: The 6 Systems Every Effective Leader Needs to Succeed

What does it really take to be an effective leader, without the constant firefighting?

In this milestone 50th episode of the Joyfully Unstoppable Podcast, Becky Hamm breaks down the six essential systems every effective leader needs to lead with clarity, confidence, and sustainable success. Whether you're leading a team, a business, or your own life, these systems will help you move from reactive decision-making to strategic leadership.

If you’ve ever felt stuck in the day-to-day chaos instead of truly leading, this episode is your roadmap.

👉 Based on Becky’s leadership coaching experience and research, these six systems are the foundation for becoming a more effective leader in today’s fast-changing world.

✨ In This Episode, You’ll Learn The 6 Systems of an Effective Leader:

1. Strategic Communication
2. Performance Accountability
3. Continuous Feedback & Growth
4. Strategic Decision-Making
5. Collaboration & Empowerment
6. Change & Adaptability

These systems work together to help you lead with intention, not urgency—so you can create sustainable, strategic success as an effective leader.

💬 Loved This Episode?

Share it with a friend or colleague who’s ready to step into their next level of leadership.

✨ Remember: Joyful, sustainable, and authentic leadership is possible—and you deserve to enjoy every minute of it.

#EffectiveLeader #LeadershipDevelopment #WomenInLeadership #ExecutiveLeadership #LeadershipSystems #TeamLeadership #StrategicLeadership #LeadershipSkills #PersonalGrowth #WomenEntrepreneurs #BusinessLeadership #LeadershipCoach #JoyfullyUnstoppable

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Transcript

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0:05

Welcome to Joyfully Unstoppable, the podcast for women who are ready to succeed without the stress. Whether you are leading a team. A classroom, a boardroom, or your own big, beautiful life. I am so glad you found us. I'm your host, Becky Hamm leadership coach, speaker and founder of Women Lead. Well join me each week for straight talk, practical tips and a dash of encouragement. Hello my friend. I hope you are doing well. Can you believe that we have made it to 50 episodes? This is episode 50 of the Joyfully Unstoppable Podcast. I am beside myself when I launched this podcast, um, a little under a year ago. I just did it 'cause I thought it would be fun. As a coach, it is not my job to tell my clients what to do. That is the definition of bad coaching. So if you have an executive coach or leadership coach or a life coach and they're trying to give you advice. Fire them. That is not their job. That does not, that is not in service to you. Your insights, your commitments are in service to you. The coach holds the space and asks the questions, but they don't tell you what to do. And if you don't believe that. Well, y'all just come on. Let me give you a gifted coaching call. You can experience true transformational coaching for yourself and see the difference, but here's my point. When I launched the Joyfully Unstoppable Podcast back in 2025, I did it because it was really hard for me to sit in these coaching calls and not tell women what to do. If I knew what I thought was the right answer, I would just have to sit on it because it's not my job. Thought I knew the right answer, but that didn't mean that I did. And so this podcast is a place where I can come and I can say, Hey, on the basis of all of my experience and all of my research, all of my expertise here is what I think we ought to be doing in these different leadership situations and, and as we face different challenges. And I love it. So if you are an OG follower, if you have listened to all 50 episodes. Sweet woman. Drop me a dm, let me know. I'm at, at Women Leadwell across all social platforms. You can find my personal account on LinkedIn. I'm Rebecca Johnson Hamm, so I've got my maiden name in there on my LinkedIn account. But drop me a note. Let me know what was your favorite episode. What do you wanna hear more of? What should we do over the next 50 episodes? I'm so excited. I love it. Okay, that is not what we were talking about today, what we are talking about today. Is me telling you what I think, and I'm gonna tell you this, I'm gonna tell you that to be an effective leader, you need six main systems to operate. And I know. Six systems we're, we're gonna be here forever. No. What we're gonna do is we're gonna say super high level today, and then if you would like a deep dive into any one of these systems, just shoot me a DM and I can do a future episode. I'm happy to dive into any of these systems in a future episode. Or my sweet friend, if you know that you need these systems. But if you've been struggling to establish them for yourself, I would invite you to check out the Women's Executive Leadership Lab where we have a group of amazing women who are building the systems that they need to empower their teams and achieve their strategic success. It's a really cool group of women and. And at a pretty relatively affordable price point, you have access for a year to the group, to a content library, to two group coaching calls a month and weekly one-on-one on the spot coaching. So have a look if that would be of interest to you. Always happy to answer any questions just to reach out over DM at Women Lead Well. So the six systems that you need, I'm gonna say you need to be an effective leader. One, strategic communication. So aligning your vision to the work of yourself and your team. Two, performance accountability, where you set and hold expectations. Three, a continuous feedback system so you can foster growth again with yourself and with your team. For a system for making effective and strategic decisions how you manage risk and pursue opportunities. Five. A system for collaboration on your team to help empower their best. And then six, a system for change so that you can see and capitalize on change or on trends as they come when you put them together. These systems ensure efficiency. They ensure trust, alignment, and they allow you to move from firefighting to leading. Out of reactivity into strategic progress. Sustainable strategic progress, which is what I want for you. So let's break 'em down one at a time. And again, we are staying high level today. I'll deep dive. Anyone you want, just reach out, let me know. System number one is your communication system, and this is where you have strategy and clarity, where they come together. And so for this system. It is a matter of establishing clear channels for consistent, transparent communication. Why do you wanna do this? Because it builds trust and it aligns your team members on goals. And so what are a few of the keys to having this communication system? One, you've gotta be clear on your strategy, right? So you need the clarity before you can communicate your vision. Your values, your mission, your priorities, anything that is time sensitive. And so your benchmarks for the year or your benchmarks for the quarter, or if there is anything, any how you want your team to do the work that they're doing. So the, the parameters on how you want them to do their jobs. All of that communicated. Repeatedly and consistently, and I've done a previous episode on this, I'll try to remember to link it in the show notes on how you just have to over communicate to be effective and it can be frustrating. And I myself, when I was new to, to more senior leadership roles, I would get really frustrated because I would think my team members or just individuals in the organization weren't listening. And it took a lot of humility on my part. To, to come to accept that they weren't blowing me off. They themselves were overwhelmed by the amount of information that was coming at them from different sources every day. And I just had to repeat myself more times than I ever thought that I would and take my ego out of it that, oh, they're not listening to me, and just reframe it as like, they just, they just need to hear it. More often, it hasn't sunk in yet. And so my repetition and my consistent every team meeting, bringing it back to the values and the priorities not to micromanage, but to set the expectation that I expected them to behave collaboratively. I expected them to put our client's interest ahead of anything else. That we were gonna operate at a high level, and if that meant that we had to stop doing things because of a budget crunch or whatever, then okay, then we were gonna stop doing some things so that we could pursue excellence in the things that we were doing, right? So communicate consistently and clearly. System number one. And so that could be through email. That could be something that you just repeat in all of your one-to-one communications. It could be something that you repeat in your team meetings and you just reinforce and reinforce and reinforce because it's gonna take a while for them to pick it up, for it to soak in. So system one, how are you communicating those priorities, those values, those key elements to how you want your team to operate? And then do three times as much as you think you need to. System number two is your accountability system. This gets clear on your expectations and then how you are receiving the results. So how your team is performing. And here key to this system is to define and document any key processes and expected results. And so effective leaders ensure that team members know what's expected of them. And effective leaders hold their team accountable. And we've talked about this before too, that giving that constructive feedback is in service to your team member. I'm gonna say it again. Giving constructive feedback is in service to your team member. If you look at the episode we had just recently on delegation, I talked about this, that, how do you provide feedback to team members on a task that you've delegated with that clarity, with that context, and you wanna continue to provide that type of feedback. Across the board, right? Not just on the tasks that you've delegated, but on any task that a team member is performing for you or any benchmark that they're working to achieve for you that feedback with kindness, with clarity, um, with the context of why it matters and what they need to know, you set them up for success. That accountability is critical because if you don't have it, if you just say, oh, that's great to everything, even if it's not great. One, you're not gonna make your deliverables with the caliber, the quality that you should, and two, you're telling that team member that their performance is acceptable when it's not. So three, you're letting them stay at a mediocre level of performance instead of communicating what they need to know to level up their performance. So you are inhibiting their growth. And that's not cool. And then four, you were signaling to all the other team members that that mediocre performance is acceptable because you haven't addressed it. And that's not cool either because you've got some hard chargers, I guarantee, on your team who are pulling more than their weight. And here you are tolerating someone who's not. That disincentivizes their performance and it fails to honor the value of their performance. So clear accountability systems. To hold your poor performers accountable. Oh, that was a tongue twister and clear accountability systems to feed into and honor, recognize and reinforce your high performers, so you don't just give attention to the, the individuals who aren't cutting it. You give attention and you continue to grow your hard chargers, or your fast movers, or your high performers as well. System number three, feedback and growth. Now this is for your own personal reflection and development, so accountability is for your team members, but this one, this feedback and growth system, this is for you. Create formal opportunities for consistent feedback and reflection. And so that could be a relationship that you have with a mentor that could be one-to-one coaching with an executive coach. That could be when you sit down with your boss, if you have a boss, to get that feedback from them in your one-to-ones that you have a targeted set of questions that you ask. To get the pulse on how you're doing. And when you sit down with your team members that you have periodically, maybe not every conversation, but every month or two, at least once a quarter, you ask them how you can serve them better. You ask for their feedback on your performance and what you can do to improve, and you take all of that. And take action on it. Not in the I I'm terrible. And look at what a terrible job I'm, this is how I'm failing. No, in a, I am a professional and a hallmark of professionalism is a commitment to continued growth. You never waste an opportunity to level up, that reflection, that feedback, is the key to leveling up. So you need a system for it. And there is so much going on. There is so much that is urgent and important that it can be easy for you to ignore this important task as well. So I'm saying don't do it. Build a system for it. Get it in your calendar. Get it in your notes of the template that you use to structure your one-to-one conversations with your team and with your boss. And if you don't have those templates, reach out. Let's have a conversation. We can build them together. They're pretty straightforward to do and yeah, never miss an opportunity to grow. System number four is your decision making system, and here I'm saying strategic decision making system. You want a process for sound judgment. Particularly judgment, under pressure or judgment in an information constrained environment where you don't know everything that you would like to know to make the decision. And so this includes how are you gonna analyze different situations, what types of data are important to inform your decisions? And then how do you. Delegate that decision making when appropriate, how do you do it effectively as opposed to working in isolation? So you've got a big decision. You can go out and do all the research that you can do from your level and try to come up with the answer. Come up with the choice or the decision yourself. You know, you can also work with your team, have your team answer the questions for you, and prepare the options and evaluate the options on the basis of the information that they have. Sometimes at the working level, that information is better, right? It's a, a more direct information, and now you take your strategic vision to it and your strategic perspective, and then you can bring all of that data and those perspectives together. And make a better decision. But it is easy, particularly in a time sensitive environment to default to what do I know right now in this moment? And because you've been doing this for a while, you probably know a lot and your judgment is probably pretty solid, but it will never be as solid as judgment that is informed by an entire team of rock stars who are bringing their best in feeding it to you in the way that you need to make your best choice. And so taking time to create that system of how that information comes to you, how you best receive the information and process it, and what information you need for any type of decision. You're gonna want certain types of information, and investing the time to create that system now and working your team so they get used to giving it to you in the way that you need it and providing the feedback to them so they can continue to refine what they give you and how they give you. All of that is going to pay dividends and it feeds into this fifth system that I wanna talk about today. Your collaboration and empowerment system. This is your team building system. This is how you cultivate an environment that empowers the members of your team. It strengthens their confidence and it fosters this feeling of togetherness. And I wanna be clear that I do not mean this in like a cheap team building trust fall kind of an exercise. I do not. I mean this in the very meaningful, you get to know what matters most. To your team, you get to communicate again over communicate systematically, consistently, that you believe in their ability to operate at a high level and to do their work, and you turn to them consistently and systematically for their input to inform the decisions that you make on behalf of the team for the organization. And the more that you do that, the more that you turn to them, learn from them and allow them to inform the decision making process and the actions that you take, the tighter your team will be because they see you investing in them and listening to them, and they in turn are gonna invest in their work and they are gonna show up for you. It is a beautiful system that is highly rewarding and it really didn't take a lot. Again, this isn't pizza party kind of team building. No. This is using your team, working the team for the common outcome to achieve the goal that is good for the team. And now the final system is system number six, and that's a system for change, adaptability. And here I'm gonna say that effective leaders have a proactive system for identifying goals, fostering resilience, identifying trends, um, being open to adaptation. Right. Having a creative problem, solving an innovative mindset and an ethos within the team to keep the team moving forward. I've said this before and you just happen to know it 'cause you are living in this world with me. We are in a period of acute change, drastic. Dislocating disruptive change, and we can cling to the old ways because they've worked in the past, or we can be clear-eyed about what's coming. We can capitalize on that to our advantage, not in a like twist, the mustache kind of capitalize on it to our advantage, but in the sense that all of our organizations have goals, they have missions, and the way that we achieve those missions, the way that we achieve those goals are changing the goals themselves. The missions themselves might be changing in light of. This broader systemic change that we're all experiencing. And so cultivating within your team, that growth mindset, that that ethos of innovation to say we are going to be open to how we can do it better and how we can do it different. That's a key to long-term success, and that change won't necessarily come easily or quickly depending on who you are and depending on who your team is and the, the ethos or the culture of the broader organization. And so again, being hyper intentional. About fostering innovation within your team and supporting initiative in your team, even when it's initiative that you yourself wouldn't take, if it's a decision that you wouldn't have made, allowing your team members to play those decisions out within bounds, right? Being giving them the. The framework or not the framework. Giving them the boundaries that you need in order to, to, to honor your commitments to the organization, but giving them the opportunity to experiment and fail and to see the trend and communicate the trend and not shut it down because it's different. Investing in that system now absolutely will pay dividends moving forward. And so those are the six systems that effective leaders maintain. I hope you found them valuable. And if you have any questions, again, reach out. I'm only ever a DM away. Now, I hope you'll join me next week when we're gonna talk about how the sandwich generation leads. If you're a caregiver to both your parents and your kids, you won't wanna miss it. If today's episode spoke to you, I would love for you to share it with a friend. We need more women leading from alignment, not adrenaline. And if you haven't already, make sure to like this episode and subscribe so you don't miss next week's drop. And last thing, if you haven't signed up for my weekly newsletter, what are you waiting for? That's where I go into greater depth than what I'm able to provide in a 20 minute podcast. I link all the research I use in creating these episodes in the newsletter. So if you wanna dive deep and look into it, you can. Subscribers also receive early access to any new programs that are launching. And so if that sounds like it would interest you, you can join@womenleadwell.net slash newsletter. Remember, joyful, sustainable, and authentic leadership are possible, and you deserve to enjoy every minute of it. Until next time, I'm Becky Hamm and this is joyfully unstoppable.