The Leader: Agile, the PAUSE Method, and Leading with Your Whole Self.

 Great leadership does not come from leaving yourself at the door. In this episode, Kendra Tamika breaks down her journey from pastry chef to certified Scrum Master, the PAUSE Method and CLEAR Framework at the center of her leadership work, and why the most effective leaders are the ones who show up as whole human beings. This one is for every woman who leads at work, at home, and everywhere in between. 

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Transcript

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Hey, hey, this is Kendra Tamika with Layer Love Universe. Welcome to episode five. We are talking today about the leader. I want to start by asking you something. Think about the last time you made a decision you regretted. Not a small one, a real one. The kind where you reacted instead of responded. Where you were overwhelmed or exhausted or frustrated, and you made a call that you knew even while you were making it was not your best thinking. Most of us have that memory. Most of us can name it pretty quickly. And most of us, if we're honest, have a pattern of making our worst decisions in our most stressed states, which makes complete sense biologically. When you are overwhelmed, your brain is in survival mode, not strategic mode. You are not accessing your full intelligence. You are just trying to get through the moment. The framework I built, the pause method, is the answer to that problem. Today we are going to walk through it fully. And if you manage any kind of team, lead any kind of organization, run any kind of business, or make any kind of decision that affects other people, which is essentially every adult human being, then this episode's for you. Let's talk through how I became an agile leader. People are often surprised to learn that I am a certified scrum master. I understand the surprise. The path from pastry chef to agile coach is not a common one. And from the outside, it probably looks like two completely different worlds. From the inside, it is the same world expressed in different language. A professional kitchen is one of the most intense leadership environments that exist. You are managing multiple priorities simultaneously, under real time, with pressure, with quality standards that do not flex, and a team of people who are all doing the same. The head chef doesn't get to say the pressure is too high today. The service happens. The standard is maintained. The team is led all at once. What I learned in the kitchen over nearly two decades in this, the best leaders are not the loudest ones. They are not the ones who create the most urgency or demand the most deference. The best leaders are the ones who create the conditions where their team can do their best work, who read the room accurately, who communicates clearly under pressure, who makes decisions quickly but not carelessly, who hold the standard without destroying the person. When I discovered Agile and pursued my Scrum Master certification, I was not learning new leadership principles. I was learning the formal language and framework for things I had been doing intuitively my entire career. And having that language, being able to name the principles and the practices and the values behind what I was doing made me significantly more effective at teaching others how to do it. Scrum is a framework for how teams organize work to produce results iteratively and collaboratively. What I love about it is that it is honest about how great work actually gets done. Not in a straight line with a perfect plan, in cycles, with regular reflection and adjustment, with built-in checkpoints where the team acts, what is working, what is not, and what do we change. That is how every good kitchen operates. That is how every healthy relationship operates. That is how my creative work operates, iteration, reflection, adjustment, keep what works, fix what does not, and move forward. Let's get into the pause method full breakdown. The pause method is the signature framework at the center of my leadership work and my book Pause Clear Lead. Let's walk through each step-by-step. P is for pause. The first step is the literal one. Stop before you respond to the email, before you walk into the meeting, before you make the call. Give yourself a moment of intentional stillness. This does not have to be long. 30 seconds, a deep breath, a five-minute walk. The point is to interrupt the automatic reactive loop before it runs. Most of our worst decisions are made on autopilot in a reactive state. The pause breaks that loop before it produces a consequence you have to manage later. A is for assess. Once you have paused, you assess the actual situation, not the story you are telling yourself about the situation, the actual facts. What do I know for certain? What am I assuming? What information do I not have that would change how I see this? Most interpersonal conflicts and most bad leadership decisions are made based on assumptions rather than facts. We assume we know why someone did something. We assume we know what the data means. We assume we know how the team feels. The assessed steps asks you to separate what you know from what you are filling in. Use for understand. Now you go deeper. You look at the full picture of what is at stake. What happens if you act on this? What happens if you do not? Who else is affected? What are the second and third order consequences of the decisions you are about to make? This is where most most leaders, this is where most leaders rush. They assess the surface and jump straight to action. The understanding step asks you to think one level deeper before you move. Not to overthink indefinitely, to think completely once. Sometimes the shift is in your perspective, sometimes it is in your approach, sometimes it is in your emotional state, sometimes it is in your understanding of what is actually needed. Here versus what you initially thought was needed. The shift is what separates the negative or reactive leader from an intentional one. The reactive leader goes from trigger to response automatically. The intentional leader inserts a deliberate shift between the trigger and the response, and that shift changes the outcome. E is for execute. Now you act. But you act from clarity instead of chaos, from intention instead of reaction, from your full intelligence instead of your most stressed state. And here is what I want you to notice about the execute step. You do not always do something different than what you would have done reactively. Sometimes you make the same call, but you made it deliberately. You chose it consciously. And that distinction matters more than it sounds like it does because the next time a similar situation comes up, you are building a pattern of intentional decision making instead of a pattern of reactive survival. Let's go into a real example. A team member misses a deadline. Again, your reactive response is to send a sharp message or address it publicly in the next team meeting. You are frustrated and you want them to know it. Pause, you stop before you send anything. Assess. This is the third missed deadline. You do not actually know why. Understand, if you react publicly, you may damage the relationship and the team dynamic and still not solve the underlying problem. Shift, you decide that curiosity is more useful than frustration right now. Execute. You request a private conversation and open with a genuine question rather than accusation. In that conversation, you learn that the team member has been managing a family crisis for the past month. The missed deadlines were a symptom of something you did not know was happening. The reactive version of you would have made the situation worse. The pause version solved the actual problem. This is what the pause method does. Not every time is the dramatic, but the principle holds, intentional beats reactive every time. Let's talk through the clear framework and leading through change. The pause method does not stand alone. It is one half of a complete leadership system, the other half is the clear framework. If the pause method is about how you make decisions, the clear framework is about how you lead people through change after the decision is made. And change management is arguably the most important leadership skill that exists because change is constant. The ability to move people through uncertainty and transition without losing their trust is what separates leaders who build enduring teams from leaders who burn through good people. Both frameworks are in the book Pause, Clear, Lead. And that book exists because I needed it and it did not exist yet. I needed a leadership resource that was built from real experience, not just theory, that was written for humans who lead other humans in real and messy situations, not for idealized case studies in a business school classroom. For me, emotional intelligence is more important in leadership than anything when you're dealing with people on a daily basis. This book is available at rememberherpublisher.com. Signed copies are available at Kendra Tamika.com. If you are a manager, a team lead, an entrepreneur, a founder, or a woman who leads at home and needs a system that actually matches the complexity of your real life, the book was written for you. I want to close this episode with something I say in every leadership context I am in. And I want to say it directly to you. You cannot separate your professional self from your human self. You can try. I don't believe it works. I have watched brilliant, capable, well-intentioned leaders attempt this their entire careers, and the cost is always too high. The cost is usually paid by the people around them. The leader who shows up as a whole person, who brings her full history and full humanity into the room, who leads from a genuine self-knowledge and a genuine care for the people she leads, that leader is more effective, more trusted, and more sustainable than any leader who learned all the right language but left herself at the door. Your layers are not a liability. They are your leadership advantage. The pacey chef in me makes a better leader. The memoir writer in me makes a better leader. The homeschooling mom in me makes a better leader. All of it. Together, it makes me someone who understands complexity and nuance and the full humanity of the people on my team because I have been required to understand my own. Lead with your whole self. That is not a suggestion. Episode six tomorrow, the teacher. I'm going to talk about homeschooling and self publishing and why I believe the most powerful thing you can do with your knowledge is give it away. Alright, see you then.