The Leaflet #122: power v clarity; exec coaching in 3 questions; small success for big identity

1. Power v clarity

Texas Senate candidate James Talarico was a seminary student trying to decide what he should do with his career. His mentor told him:

If you go into the ministry, you’ll have clarity, but you won’t have power. If you go into politics, you’ll have power but won’t have clarity.

I think this is a strong insight that applies within teams as well. As you rise through your organization’s hierarchy, you gain power and lose clarity. This is, in part, because the time horizon you’re responsible for increases as you rise as well. The more senior you are, the more and further you look into the future. The future is famously hard to predict.

That’s one rub for new leaders. A second rub, layered on the first, is that the clarity those folks you manage enjoy - it comes, in part, from you. So, without lying or disingenuously making stuff up, you have to derive and deliver clarity for others. You set goals and chart ways the team will reach them. Meanwhile, you live within cloudiness.

If I was trying to be cuter about this I’d hit you with “clout v cloudiness” instead of “power v clarity” but I’d never actually write that. He said. Disingenuously.

-eric

2. Executive coaching reduced to three questions

Over thousands of hours of coaching sessions, we find we go to three questions more than any others. You can use these on yourself or steal them for work with your own reports.

1. If we time travel 12 months from now and [this thing you’re worried/confused about] has gone exceptionally well, what did you do to make that happen?

2. Have you told them that? (Applies equally to praise/affirmation and feedback/criticism. The answer to this question is almost always “no” or “not exactly” with a face that says “But I know I should”)

3. How can you teach someone else to do this, so you don’t have to?

ben & eric

3. Using small success to build big identity

When someone on the team has earned a win, especially in the early going, there’s big upside for a leader to seize. This is especially true when the winner on the team took on a new challenge or got the win from a new position of power (eg, leading a meeting or managing a project that you’d normally run). You can help this person think of themselves as a strong leader rather than simply as a competent contributor (or, worse, “an occasionally lucky contributor”).

Pretty much any way you can point out to this person that you saw them get this win is worthwhile. You noticing their success is valuable. You can get the biggest return for them and the team if you use this small success to build a bigger identity for them. The ingredients of that powerful species of acknowledgement are:

1. Naming the choice they made (not just the raw input / action - the decision that animated that input)

2. Naming the impact it had

   1. Naming what that unlocks or makes possible for you or for others on the team.

3. Naming what that tells you about this person’s values and character

4. Setting the expectation that you’ll need more of this from them and are confident you’ll see it.

You can do 1-5 in just a couple of sentences privately between the two of you or publicly on a Slack thread. Either way, this small win can help a self-effacing, humble leader-on-the-make embrace a role as a dependable, strong leader within the team (no matter what their title or tenure say).

-eric

COMPELLING QUOTATIONS (back by popular demand!)

Anonymous, in Tehran, on living in a war:

Is it important to write that the aftertaste of my morning coffee seems stronger and more pleasant these days and I don’t feel guilty about it? To write that during this war I have spent most of my time, as I did during the previous war, on the rooftop, because when I am stuck in my room and I hear the sounds of explosions it drives me insane not to be able to see or guess their source?

Novelist Hilary Mantel describing the experience of a beheading:

Beneath him the ground upheaves. The river tugs him; he looks for the quick-moving pattern, for the flitting, liquid scarlet. Between a pulse-beat and the next he shifts, going out on crimson with the tide of his inner sea.

Commentator Chuck Klosterman on movies:

Especially in the early 1970s, everyone was consumed with the auteur concept, which gave directors the to completely (and autonomously) construct a movie’s vision. For roughly a decade, film was a director’s medium. Today [2003], film is a producer’s medium (the only director with complete control of his product is George Lucas and he elects to make kids’ movies).