Meaning-Making & Musings

Authenticity is a critical leadership trait. Research shows that it facilitates more trusting relationships and a more positive working environment. Often, though, in my executive coaching practice, I hear senior leaders use ‘authenticity’ as a covert excuse to resist development.

So often, early-career professionals enter the workforce and receive technical feedback from managers: fix code this way, prepare for a check-in using this template, sequence slides like this for a presentation. This type of feedback is helpful. Too often though, managers are nervous to share behavioral feedback.

As executive coaches who have supported hundreds of senior leaders, we believe this one-dimensional focus on results is seductive, but eventually self-sabotaging and shortsighted. Today’s leaders need to focus on results and interpersonal relationships for long-term success.

Too often though, leaders assume that regulation means suppressing or dismissing emotions, especially those deemed “negative” like anger, jealousy, loneliness, or shame. Paying attention to what one truly feels is a powerful and underutilized leadership skill. 

Managers often use performance reviews to mold and shape employee behaviors and results. They trust that formally telling high performers what they’re doing wrong one to two times a year will lead to them immediately doing it right. There’s an operating assumption that formal feedback provides employees with enough information to improve performance moving forward.

Some inconvenient relationships come to a natural end, others we intentionally decide we don’t have space for, or interest in, any longer. Others though, like my friendship with Liz, deserve to be revived or cultivated because when neglected, we lose something meaningful: the chance to be fulfilled, awed, or known.

This means that instead of fixating on, ‘What are we doing?!’ I’m trying to take a breath and look beyond the smoke filled casino accommodations and incessant, piercing referee whistle to notice: ‘What’s the hidden magic?’ 

While I don’t coach superheroes with psychic abilities, I do coach senior leaders who regularly hide from the truth of who they fear becoming. Their refusal to examine the fear stunts their growth, limits their impact and keeps them as fragmented versions of themselves.

With 2022 upon us, I wonder if we could all use some quiet to tune into what we most want for the year ahead. And in that quiet, can we be brave enough to own it – even with fear of judgment or embarrassment?

As a leadership coach, I see countless clients protecting their ‘edge’ to guarantee their professional success. Maybe it’s their ability to function on four hours of sleep or know every decision being made company-wide. On its face, protecting this desirable edge feels like a reasonable endeavor; who wouldn’t want 20 productive hours in their day? Turns out though, it can be tormenting, akin to worshipping a false idol.

I think we naively trust that dreams can wait until our savings goal is reached, we have an empty nest, the self-doubt disappears, or the promotion comes. The truth is that the aneurysm, breast cancer diagnosis, or heart attack might show up as the headliner way before. And then, our unrealized dreams die with us.

Sadly, uncertainty can’t be avoided; we can’t know the unknowable or the guaranteed right answer no matter how competent we may be. So, we need to build skill to be with uncertainty and resist letting our nervous systems and egos drive our impulsive reactions.

Often, we’re so fixated on sleuthing for threats with our magnifying glass, tuning into tiny footprints and breadcrumb clues, that we don’t acknowledge reality: what we most fear might already be upon us.

Humbling as it is to admit, I think it’s time to take my husband’s approach. Since we can’t know for certain how this unparalleled pandemic will play out, we need to notice what’s emerging in and around us and, piece by piece, craft the picture of our new world together.

Many of us have spent decades becoming expert pretenders and while it’s eating us up inside, we think it’s the only option we have. If we don’t pretend, we’ll be fired, seen as incompetent, spiral into self-pity, or deemed downright irresponsible. But what if ending pretending means something altogether different?

Underneath the exhaustion though is pain, I believe. Pulling out all the items nestled in the overflowing confines of our coat closet calls me to confront certain realities that hurt.