087 | Stop Playing Therapist: How Female Founders Use AI to End Team Drama

Your team isn’t bringing you drama because they’re needy — they’re bringing it because you’ve trained them to believe every hiccup requires CEO intervention.

But here’s the truth: your job is to ensure professional collaboration, not personal comfort.

This episode is your reminder that you’re not the office therapist. You’re the CEO. And with the Function First Framework (plus a little AI backup), you can redirect emotional spirals back to work outcomes and save yourself hours every week.

You’ll learn…

• Why stepping into therapist mode steals focus from your real CEO work
• The Function First Framework to redirect team drama back to performance
• AI scripts you can use to acknowledge feelings while keeping conversations outcome-focused
• Why caring about your people doesn’t mean carrying their emotional labor

This episode at a glance:

[00:00] – You’re not your team’s therapist (and why that matters)
[02:00] – Professional collaboration vs. personal comfort
[04:00] – The Function First Framework: redirect, set standards, track outcomes
[06:00] – How AI can generate scripts that keep you in CEO mode
[07:00] – Recap + reminder: caring ≠ carrying

Resources and links mentioned in this episode:

• The Feedback Fix – Free Guide: Scripts to stop playing therapist and redirect drama to outcomes
• Join the AI for Founders Community
• AI for Founders Playbook Waitlist

Want to increase revenue and impact? Listen to “She's That Founder” for insights on business strategy and female leadership to scale your business. Each episode offers advice on effective communication, team building, and management. Learn to master routines and systems to boost productivity and prevent burnout. Our delegation tips and business consulting will advance your executive leadership skills and presence.

Transcript

She's That Founder
087 | Stop Playing Therapist: How Female Founders Use AI to End Team Drama

Real talk. Your team's not bringing you their drama because they're needy. They're bringing it to you because you've trained them to believe that every interpersonal hiccup is an emergency that requires CEO intervention. 

And honestly, that's on you.

Welcome to She's That Founder Thursday edition. These are the quick rants kick in the pants, velvet boot moments that represent me standing in the future, pulling you towards an even stronger, better, more powerful version of yourself with AI as your copilot.

So if you spent more time this week mediating personality conflicts, including your own than you did working on vision and strategy, we need to have a conversation. Last Tuesday, I got a text from a client at 9:47 PM, not about a client crisis, not about a strategy shift, but about whether she should mediate between two team members who have different communication styles that are creating tension.

I stared at that text and I thought, when did we decide that running a business means becoming the office therapist? 

Here's what I told her. And here's what I'm telling you. You are not responsible for managing the feelings between two grown adults that they have about each other. So for instance, if you hired Sarah to manage client accounts and you hired Mike to handle project delivery, that's great, but you did not hire them.

To like each other's communication style, you hired them to do excellent work professionally, regardless of whether Mike's directness hurts, Sarah's feelings, and I'm not saying we want people to do this intentionally, but humanity is humanity and stuff happens. You gave it your best shot with hiring for a culture fit, but now those grown adults get to be grown adults and make it work.

I see this with every single female founder I coach. I don't know if it's our desire to be liked. I don't know if it's sort of being the hub, like sociologically speaking, being the hub of the community and trying to make sure that everybody gets along and everybody's okay.

But somewhere along the way we started believing that good leadership means. Diving into the psychology of why Jessica feels unheard, or why Tom seems dismissive, or why the team dynamic feels off.

It's that diving in that concerns me, and that's what I'm bringing to you today because here's the thing that nobody's telling you every minute you spend analyzing why people feel the way they feel is a minute stolen from ensuring the work gets done with excellence.

 I mean, let's face it, you are not trained to unpack someone's childhood communication patterns. And in fact, if you are trained to unpack someone's childhood communication patterns, I would argue that this is even more for you this episode, because the tendency is gonna be to go towards your expertise and dig into that stuff.

But that's not what your leadership is for when you're running your business. You're tasked with, you've chosen to run a business where functions must be performed by the people you hired to perform them. Otherwise, the business cannot succeed and you cannot provide the pay and the support and the community that you provide to your team.

So here's the mindset tweak that changes everything. Your job is to ensure professional collaboration, not personal comfort.

Let me just review that one more time. Your job is to ensure professional collaboration and the outcomes and results that come with that, but your job is not to ensure personal comfort and just to be clear, like if there is an HR issue that is really affecting someone's personal comfort. Cool. 

But I'm talking about this day-to-day, you know, team drama that we get pulled into and then we try to dive in deep and, and, you know, armchair psychology, solve it. So back to our examples, Sarah doesn't have to like Mike's communication style. She has to collaborate with him effectively enough that clients are delighted and projects are delivered on time.

That's it. 

The moment you start therapy sessions about why Mike reminds Sarah of her older brother, you've let your own psychology and family history take over and you've forgotten that you're running a business.

So to help you out, I am sharing my function first framework. And this is something that not you can do with or without AI, but the framework can save you hours every week and potentially big time savings over months. 

So step one, redirect the conversation to work impact. Instead of saying, tell me how Mike made you feel. Say, how is this affecting your ability to deliver the project? 

Step two, set some professional standards. So instead of, let's process this conflict together, say this, I need you to collaborate effectively on this deliverable. And if personal dynamics are affecting your work quality, come back to me with solutions that ensure we exceed our client's expectations. So you're putting the feelings that you're trying to resolve with your team members back into their court for them to handle. 

And the last step in the function first framework is to track outcomes, not emotions. So again, I know sometimes as women we're really tuned in to what the vibe is, and we're tracking it everywhere, but I'm asking you to choose when those moments happen, not be driven by those moments happening. So instead of asking how is everyone feeling about the team dynamic, about our retreat, about the work that we just finished, start asking, are we meeting deadlines? Is our quality maintained? Are client satisfied? And if the answer is yes, the interpersonal stuff starts to become background noise, not your emergency to fix as the leader.

So here's where AI can become your secret weapon. Y'all know I use AI all the time for all the things, and over the course of the mini podcasts that in fact, you can go back to nearly any podcast episode and you'll find some version of how to use AI to save time to make your life better and easier as a leader.

So in this case, I use AI to generate those function first, redirects, those little scripts that I just read you that acknowledge feelings, but immediately shift focus back to the work outcome. So here's an example. Instead of getting pulled into amateur psychology, AI can help you respond with. I can see this is bothering you. What specific work process needs to change to ensure that we deliver excellence for our client? That's an example of a script that AI produced for me, and it keeps you in CEO mode and not therapist mode. So if you're tired of being your team's emotional support, CEO.

I've got something for you.

Download the feedback fix at gofreerangethinking.com/the-feedback-fix. It's my free guide that includes the scripts that I use with my clients to redirect team drama back where it belongs. With your team members, you'll get the function first. Redirect phrases and prompts that acknowledge the feelings, but immediately shift focus to work outcomes.

So no more amateur therapy,  no more managing personalities instead of performance. Because here's the truth, you can care deeply about your team and expect them to do their jobs professionally, regardless of their feelings about each other.

That is not cold, my good friend. That is leadership. 

So download the feedback, fix at gofreerangethinking.com/the-feedback-fix. I'm encouraging you to stop being the office therapist and start leading like the CEO that you are. 

Here's a quick recap of what we covered.

Stop being the office therapist. Professional collaboration matters more than personal comfort. 

Use the function first frameworks to redirect drama to work outcomes, and stay human. Stay caring, but lead with boundaries. 

Okay, my beautiful human. I know this hits hard because you care so deeply about your people that caring is your superpower, but caring doesn't mean carrying everyone's emotional labor. You can love your team fiercely and expect them to show up as the capable professionals you hired them to be. You're not being mean When you redirect drama back to work, you're being a leader. And honestly, your team is waiting for you to step into your authority, so do that.

 Okay, Lovie. Until next time, keep leading with love and boundaries.