Leadership coaching clients are often advised to leverage their strengths. This is sometimes interpreted to mean ‘keep doing what you are doing, but do it more…’ Yet clients are also counseled that if overused, those strengths become weaknesses: assertiveness leads to bullying; detail-orientation leads to micro-managing, and so on. How to reconcile this mixed message? The insights of leadership scholar Robert Kaplan are quite useful here. In Internalizing Strengths (1999, CCL), a short but powerful monograph, he asserts that most of our high performing clients are articulate, analytical, and insecure — anxious they will be revealed as somehow not good enough. Their high performance helps keep ‘imposter anxiety’ at bay. And what quicker, more efficient way to high performance than to exercise one’s strengths, over and over again? Kaplan’s point is that overusing strengths is not leveraging them. Rather, leadership development starts by first deeply accepting our strengths as strengths. In other words, the world already gets how great we are and so should we. Is there a too smart? True confession: as a younger consultant, I over-did proving to everybody how smart I was. I used lots of jargon, spoke first and fast in client meetings, and relied on
The conference room was a mess. Participants were starting to arrive and the tables were scattered haphazardly about the room. Our materials for the two-day session were still in boxes in the corner of the room. My partner Rob had been there since 7:15 and he had not touched a thing. I was surprised. I started to sweat. This was a really important client. Okay, it was, in fact, 7:40 when I arrived even though we had agreed to meet at 7:15. But I had a 45-minute drive and he didn’t. And, yes, when I arrived, he was engaged with the tech support person setting up the projector for our power-point slides. But I had been late before—I’m “reliably” just a few minutes late. And Rob is “reliably” on time, and takes care of details. That was our pattern: I would be late, arriving with apologies and justifications; explanations I had rehearsed and honed during the time I should have already been there. Meanwhile, he would cover for me and have everything set up. Why was this time different? My answer arrived at the end of the day, after co-facilitating an especially challenging leadership program with a group of demanding
In my practice, I often coach “high potential” executives, so named because they’re part of a select pool of talent from which a company’s future leaders will be chosen. As is typical in these coaching relationships, one of my key roles is to listen deeply. I hear a lot of lies. Recently, one mid-level manager was discussing with me her professional experiences and some of her anxieties about performing effectively at the next level. “I’ve been an implementer all my life,” she asserted, “and now I’m being asked to come up with ideas. But that’s not me! When I’m in those meetings where everyone is suggesting ideas, I draw a blank. My tiny little brain just does not work that way.” I’d been coaching her for several months and this was not the first time I heard her use the phrase, “my tiny little brain,” but I had not previously said anything. As our conversation continued I noticed that she repeated the same expression two more times. Finally, I asked, “Do you really think your brain is so tiny?” “What?” she replied, surprised at the question. “Oh, that. No, that’s just an expression. I don’t mean anything by it,” she
Too many leaders make fast (and wrong) decisions in the face of disagreement. They trust their own thinking, and then justify their decision based on what they interpret as positive results. Yet they fail to consider the cost of rejecting an opposing view that would have led to a different decision or additional insight. I recently learned this firsthand: The story starts two years ago, when in a moment of weakness my wife gave me a helmet for my birthday and permission to buy a scooter. As most men might predict, after 15 months I required an upgrade. A friend was leaving the country, and needed to sell his four motorcycles (it seems you can’t have just one). After a brief email exchange, I bought his biggest, heaviest, and most purple cruising bike. I bought it sight unseen AND sound unheard. The first time I cranked the beast I was shocked. It didn’t purr as expected. Rather, it started with an apocalyptic blast, and then settled in to an endless series of deafening explosions. My friend called this “running smoothly.” He drove it first and I could still hear him 9 blocks later. As I waited, disheartened, I reviewed my
Recently, some friends in Asheville, NC introduced me to the River Arts District where I discovered an unexpected nugget of wisdom. Here, amid a collection of art studios down by the French Broad River, I had an encounter with a prolific, internationally known painter at his studio / gallery. He was preparing to take the stage to demonstrate his craft. He chatted with a few members of the audience as he set up. “What are you going to paint today?” asked one. Without batting an eye, the artist confidently replied “I don’t know.” I don’t know. Too often, this thought stops me in my tracks. Like many of my clients, it is easy for me to convince myself that I’m being paid as an expert; or, if they are bosses, to always have the answer. Admitting I don’t know is something we’ve learned should be avoided because it brings up feelings of inadequacy and incompetence. Yet for this artist, I don’t know had unusual meaning and power. It expressed his openness to creativity and to collaborating with his brushes, paints, and canvas. He was constrained neither by self-criticism nor by expectations of pre-ordained results. He was not made weak by
We cannot help be but who we are. This hit home recently when I reviewed a 360-degree feedback report with the new president of a high tech company. Catherine’s vice-presidents viewed her as a passionate, brilliant, credible yet compassionate leader – a rare and wonderful person and executive. Yet she was also perceived as a self-righteous, opinionated micro-manager, who communicated emphatically and quickly that she was always right. Maybe not so good… I thought we were making progress after an hour or so of wrestling around the issues, and finally getting beyond her self-justifications. All of a sudden one of the verbatim comments from the feedback report caught her eye and she said, “I vehemently disagree with this. How can he say I’m not 100% committed to the company because of my external board participation? It’s important that we are represented in the community, blah blah…” Her comment stopped me cold, and I re-stated what she said – “you vehemently disagree?” I asked. “Catherine, couldn’t you just disagree regular, without the vehemence?” She stared at me for a moment, and started to crack up laughing, at which point so did I. The moment encapsulated for her more than any other
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