Helping leaders do their inner work to unlock hypergrowth

On the face of it, coachability is nothing more than receptivity to the feedback we need for growth. So simple, yet evidently difficult enough in practice to be an uncommon quality. So, how does one become more coachable? I’ve written an answer below in the form of three provocations for greater coachability. Curiosity is key because these ideas are fundamentally non-obvious.

This wide-ranging conversation for the inaugural episode of Pearl’s podcast “Rebel Curiosities” covered so many topics near and dear to my heart: stuckness and freedom, courage and fear, superpowers and their dark sides. Give the episode a listen and let me know what you think. Till then — as Pearl would say — stay curious, and take care.

I would be a terrible salesperson for compassionate leadership. But as a coach I feel compelled to remind my coachees: their struggles, their doubts, their wondering and not-knowing if they’re doing the right thing are not indications that something is wrong, but the clearest signs that they are deep in the practice of compassionate leadership. At the precise moment when we begin to wonder if our lives would be easier if we had fewer qualms and doubts about our impact on others, we are presented with a choice to stay awake or go back to sleep.

As complexity mounts and pressure grows, scalable leadership deploys our strengths in ways that amplify the capabilities of those we work with. In contrast, leadership that fails to scale defaults to uses of our strengths that deplete organizational capacity and lead to diminishing returns on our time and energy. When business operations fail to scale, they break; when our leadership fails to scale, we break those around us — and the business along with it.

We’re now solidly in the Fall, which can only mean the season of decorative gourds, Halloween decorations, premature Christmas decorations, and ... feedback is upon us. Whether you belong to a large organization with a systematic performance review process, or work at a smaller startup that’s at least committed to an informal practice of taking stock of the past year’s work, it’s likely that you’ll be receiving some feedback this quarter — if you haven’t already.

What’s your superpower? Incredibly successful people who’ve honed their elevator pitches to perfection and know their resumes like the back of their hands seem curiously at a loss for words when I ask them this question. Part of the difficulty, I suspect, is that it requires us to know something about who we are, not just what we’ve done by way of our degrees, awards, titles, and so forth. Which begs the question — how did it come to be that so many of us find it easier to see ourselves in our doing than in our being?

The selfless impulse to take responsibility and to repair is a marvel to behold. Under the right circumstances, it is a precious gift that has the power to change lives and heal a broken world into wholeness. But without anger to remind us where we end and others begin, we have no way of knowing whether we’re using our gifts out of choice or compulsion. Trust that you can bear what your anger already knows, because your gifts are far too precious to be lost in self-forgetting.

Lean in, embrace the suck, fuck your feelings — if you’re looking for a stick to beat yourself up with you need never look far, but I have yet to see management advice that suggests it might be helpful for us to more fully feel the pain we experience in our professional lives. There’s nothing inherently wrong with capitalizing our pain for the promise of some future payoff. The problem is that what begins as an intentional decision to trade off present pain for future reward too easily becomes a numbing and forgetting of what pain feels like entirely.

How do you overcome a lifetime of cultural conditioning that makes advocating for yourself at work feel like courting disaster — like an overgrown tree asking to be cut down by the wind? The reframe that’s worked for me is realizing that whatever we may feel we risk by taking up space with our ambitions and wants, we risk all the more by making ourselves small.

The fact that dominant cultural norms are just accepted by the majority as common sense means that as minorities, we not only don’t know what we don’t know, but also that those who do know can’t explain it to us. Moreover, we don’t arrive in America tabula rasa, but with our own cultures that we’ve been steeped in from birth. Trying to unlearn or fight our own cultural conditioning head-on would take far too long, and often feels inauthentic. We need ways of reframing our challenges in ways that enable us to work with, rather than against, our cultural scripts.

Before it goes the way of other corporate fads, consigned to the graveyard of hollow management rhetoric, it’s worth attempting to recover some of its initial promise: What are we actually inviting into the workplace when we ask people to bring their whole selves? What do we owe one another, as employees and leaders alike, if we intend to take this invitation seriously?

While writing these reflections I’ve had the repeated sensation of running up against the limits of our vocabulary for discussing our professional lives. How many ways are there to say that I was loved – because that’s what it was, that’s what I’ve been trying to say the whole time - without prompting cynicism, mawkishness, or awkward questions from HR?