Leadership Q&A: Tone, culture, volunteers, and career strengths

Executive overview

New and experienced leaders alike struggle to calibrate tone, influence without authority, and act with incomplete information. This monthly Q&A surfaces practical answers across five listener questions. Dave Stachowiak and Bonni Stachowiak draw on real experience — not theory.

The core insight: the best leadership moves are rarely either/or — ask more, assume less, and serve the audience in front of you.

Advice to your earlier leadership self

• Ask more questions — it builds relationships, depth, and better decisions.
• Don't take things personally; you are rarely as central to someone else's story as you think.
• Move with 40–60% of the information instead of waiting for 90–95%.
• Know your audience: understand what each person — manager, employee, customer — actually needs from you.
• Ambiguity is the norm in leadership; get comfortable with it early.

Balancing serious and playful tone with employees

• Stern and fun are not opposites — the best workplaces do both.
• Your preference is a starting point, not a mandate; flex your style to the situation.
• A team member with a different natural tone is an asset, not a problem.
• Let each person lead where their style is strongest (e.g., effervescent colleague handles the room; you go deep one-on-one).
• Under pressure, a release valve matters — humor protects against burnout over long careers.
• Customers typically need both relatability and seriousness; an organization that can deliver both has an edge.

Leading volunteers in nonprofits

• Treat volunteers like employees: recruit deliberately, write job descriptions, and match people to roles.
• Have a pipeline of specific volunteer roles even before you have people to fill them.
• Promote volunteers who are underutilised in their current function.
• Have a process for removing toxic volunteers — it can be done with dignity and fairness.
• Influencing without authority is the core skill; leading volunteers is one of the best training grounds for it.
• Even in traditional employment, dotted-line relationships mean most leaders must influence without authority.
• Simon Sinek's "Start with Why" (episode 223) is directly relevant: connect volunteers to the organisation's purpose.

Changing culture as a new manager

• Identify a nobler motive — a principle so obviously right that no one in the organisation can argue against it.
• You may not control company policy, but you can control the operating culture of your team.
• Lead by example first; articulate the principle to staff, then make decisions that reinforce it consistently.
• Rally people around what is bigger than any individual, team, or management chain.
• Trash talk up and down the chain shrinks once people share a common purpose worth protecting.
• Culture change takes time; recognising the complexity is itself a sign of leadership maturity.

Putting StrengthsFinder results to work

• Use strengths as a lens when scoping your contribution to a specific project, not as a fixed identity label.
• Identify where your strengths will help — and where they will hold the project back.
• Map other team members' strengths (informally, without labelling them) and engage them where they are strongest.
• Avoid oversimplifying: models are useful frames, not complete descriptions of a person.
• For career path decisions, pair StrengthsFinder with What Color Is Your Parachute? (Richard Nelson Bolles) — it provides the tactical exercises StrengthsFinder lacks.
• Scott Barlow's free eight-day course (episode 259) bridges vocabulary to action for career decisions.