Welcome to our ‘Unlocking Leadership’ series, where we tap into the wisdom of some of the most inspiring founders, leaders and business minds of today.
Sarah Langslow is an executive coach and leadership development specialist. She integrates leadership lessons from a sporting career as a rower, including competing twice in the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, a 15-year corporate career across management consulting and finance, and experience as an entrepreneur with her own coaching and leadership development business.
Sarah’s new, best-selling book, ‘Do Sweat the Small Stuff: Harness the power of micro-interactions to transform your leadership‘, illuminates the often unrecognised power of micro-interactions to supercharge leadership effectiveness and people development. Drawing from thousands of hours of experience, coaching hundreds of clients, the book provides a structured, practical guide to the small, ubiquitous, yet crucial behaviours that leaders need to demonstrate to lead effectively.
Your book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff encourages leaders to harness the power of their everyday ‘micro-interactions’; what do you mean by this and why do you believe this to be game-changing for leaders?
SL: Micro-interactions are the moments of connection we have with other humans that occur in their multitudes every single day. They are what we say, and don’t say. They are how we say things: the phrasing, tone, timing, and energy. They are what we listen to and what we ignore, consciously or otherwise. They are our facial expressions and emotions, our habits and our behaviours.
They form the foundations of our relationships. Because around a core of significant events and important conversations, the majority of what makes up our relationships are short, apparently inconsequential interactions. These are not interactions into which we put a great deal of thought, planning or intention. Yet we cannot lead effectively without strong relationships; they are how we engage and inspire our teams and organisations to deliver our vision and results. Hence, our micro-interactions matter.
As a leader you set the tone, and your micro-interactions and behaviours influence the culture. This is because of the power dynamics in place — i.e. a leader’s ability to reward or punish. Power and authority add significance to every micro-interaction, because those around you make them significant. They add meaning, and that in turn drives their own behaviour and choices and magnifies the importance of considering and being thoughtful in your micro-interactions.
The good news is that as leaders we can harness the power of micro-interactions: by being thoughtful and intentional about our impact we can use them to build trust, increase engagement, strengthen relationships and ultimately drive performance.
What do you consider to be three of the most important qualities for great leaders?
They sweat the small stuff
The most effective leaders all sweat the small stuff, in other words, their micro-interactions. They understand the profound impact they have through what they say, how they say it, what they listen to and ignore, how they act, what they prioritise, and how they manage their emotions. They are intentional with the nuances of how they communicate and work with others and adapt in order to get the best out of their people.
Leadership is about relationships; it’s how you work with people, how you engage and inspire your teams and organisations to work towards a vision for the future. The most effective leaders make things happen through influence: they get things done by inspiring people to want to do them and want to do them well. A huge part of that occurs through your everyday micro-interactions. Sweating the small stuff doesn’t have to be time-consuming. What it requires is a little more thought and intention, slowing down just enough to consider what your impact could be, and what you actually intend it to be.
Sarah’s first book: ‘Do Sweat the Small Stuff: Harness the power of micro-interactions to transform your leadership‘They care
The best leaders don’t just prioritise their people, they care about them. When you care about your people, it drives your every action and interaction. Your focus is on helping them thrive, simply because that’s what matters to you. When you do that, you will create an engaged, committed team and the results tend to take care of themselves.
Caring can manifest in different ways, and it’s important to go beyond the superficial. The boss who buys a round of drinks after work but never makes time for deeper conversations is only really caring at a shallow level. It’s also not enough to be simply reactive: the best leaders I’ve worked with make the effort proactively in a way that builds trust, respect and loyalty.
They have strong sensing skills
Leadership is intrinsically dynamic. We can’t predict what each moment will bring, or what will happen next, so we have to be agile enough to respond to whatever is unfolding in front of us. Good leaders learn to read situations: what is happening, what are the risks, what are the options? They also go a layer deeper, noticing signals from those around them about what’s going on, even when it is not explicitly spelled out. Such leaders can sense changes in energy and shifts in the mood of the room, or read subtle, non-verbal cues.
It is essential to pair this with a mindset of curiosity, so that your instincts can be tested, and either confirmed or refined. Just because you have noticed something going on, doesn’t mean you know exactly what that is. Sensing skills allow you to flex and adapt to the person and situation in front of you, so as to be effective in any given moment.
How do you coach leaders to become aware of the impact of their speaking patterns and make changes to what are very deeply entrenched habits?
My style of coaching is to work on real live issues, not hypothetical situations. So, I might start by asking a client what frustrates them about their team – though I often don’t even need to ask, my clients bring this to their coaching sessions!
For those frustrations I ask:
- How might you be responsible for it going this way?
- What are you doing (albeit unintentionally) that might be enabling or encouraging this behaviour?
The value of this exercise is twofold: first, it provides a clear pointer to where something is breaking down in the communication between a leader and their team. This gives us a place to explore how they are communicating and how that might be contributing to the behaviour. Second, it encourages the leader to take responsibility; if what they are saying and how and when they are saying it isn’t having the desired impact, that’s on them. And, that’s not a problem, but an opportunity to experiment with a different approach.
Once we’ve built the awareness and explored what they could do differently, the next step is to understand if they are willing to experiment. Trying out new ways of communicating might include different phrasing, slowing down and not jumping in, asking more questions or leaving more space for your team to speak up. It’s not about there being a right way to interact but being willing to practice, try out different approaches, then reflect to see what works.
In your experience, what are the most common blind spots leaders have with their micro-interactions?
A surprisingly common blind spot is a failure to realise that not everyone is like us; that different people have different preferences in how they work, how they communicate, how they contribute and so on. It seems obvious, yet many leaders don’t think through the implications of that awareness. First, that it is important to take the time to learn about those different preferences, and second, to then be willing to adapt our own communication style to get the best out of others.
The other common blind spot I see is to be unaware of where we are incongruent in our interactions, sometimes in quite subtle ways. For example, it’s not enough to say ‘My door is always open’ or ‘You can talk to me anytime’, because if your language constantly reinforces how busy you are, the perception that your door isn’t really open will be stronger. Or, at the very least, that you’d rather no one took you up on your offer to talk to them!
What has been a personal career highlight?
Publishing my first book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff this summer really has been a highlight. The idea at the heart of the book had its genesis in my coaching work, when I realised that the changes I work on with my clients can feel small and insignificant, to both them and me. Yet cumulatively, the nuances of our communication and behaviours have a huge impact on those around us, especially when we are in a position of power. Understanding and paying attention to our micro-interactions allows us to become aware of our impact, be intentional in how we interact, and thus become more effective leaders.
Writing a book was a way to magnify my impact, share my ideas, and challenge the thinking of a much wider audience. The process also had a huge impact on me. Writing really forces you to clarify your thinking. Having to distil complex ideas into clear, accessible explanations has made me a better coach and leader. The discipline and staying power required across more than two and a half years — from idea through to publication — also gave me renewed confidence in my capabilities and ability to do hard things. It’s exciting to now see it out in the world, making a difference.
Is there any particular area where your clients have seen rapid results, having made changes to micro-interactions?
One of the simplest and most effective skills leaders can build is that of asking powerful questions. One example of the impact this can make is a client who was frustrated that her team never asked for help, even though it would subsequently become clear that they needed it.
At the end of meetings, she would ask: “Does everyone understand what they need to do?”, and would get nods or silence in response, only for issues to emerge later which could have been avoided. I reflected to her how hard it might be for her team to speak up in a public setting, and effectively admit to their boss and everyone on the team that they didn’t understand. That it might feel unsafe, or at the very least, vulnerable to say: “No, I don’t understand”.
So, she made one simple change. At the end of meetings, she started to ask: “What support can I give you with this?”. Embedded in the question is the assumption that support is normal and available, and that she wanted to provide it. It had an almost immediate effect. Her team started asking more questions, seeking her support earlier. And because she also practised consistency, continuing to ask even when no one spoke up, it built trust that support was available when it was needed, so her team were more likely to approach her at other times too.
Context matters here, the speed of results can depend on a lot of factors, including the levels of trust already present. Nonetheless, learning to ask powerful questions at the right moments can make a big difference, fast.
And finally, your must-read book?
I’m something of a nerd for non-fiction books as I love to learn. My favourite recent read is Right Kind of Wrong, by Amy Edmondson (Cornerstone Press, 2023).
I’ve always hated failing at things – which is of course true for a lot of people. In my adult life, and particularly as an entrepreneur, while I understand the necessity and inevitability of failure on an intellectual level, embracing failure emotionally is much harder.
What I loved about this book is that Edmondson acknowledges the fear and aversion to failure that most of us feel, and then actually breaks down how to fail well. This is both in terms of how to identify failures that are worth pursuing (and those that we should do our best to avoid) alongside practical, helpful and non-condescending ways to handle the emotional impact and reframe our perceptions.
It left me (somewhat to my surprise) willing and even excited to go out and experiment more, to try some things I’d been avoiding out of fear that they might not work out. The balance of well-told stories and rigorous, well-presented research shifted my thinking, even on a familiar subject. To me, the mark of a good book is one that makes you think, feel and act differently, and Right Kind of Wrong did all three.
Learn more about Sarah Langslow and her new book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff.
