Four Words That Set Successful Leaders Apart

Dave Stachowiak (0:06)

Hey, it's Dave from Coaching for Leaders here. I'm coming to you today to directly answer a question that I get asked all the time when we open up our Academy for applications as we have again this week. The question I get from applicants consistently, including several times in recent days, is this one. What helps leaders get the most success out of the Academy? Now, that's a question I get in the context of talking to leaders who are applying to our Academy. But it's also a broader question for all of us, which is, what's really different about leaders who are really the ones who are learning and growing and getting better at what they do and even thrive from those who don't?

I've been in the business of helping leaders improve now for over 20 years, and I have a very clear answer to that question. And it comes down to four words. I'm gonna walk you through those four words in this episode and how you can get better at moving forward with them right now. Before I do, we have many new listeners who've joined the podcast since the last time we opened the Academy. Welcome, if that's you. So let me first say what the Academy is. The Academy helps leaders thrive at key inflection points, which of course, begs the obvious question, well, what is an inflection point? There are a lot of inflection points in life and in work, but generally I see it show up in three ways, at least for people here in our leadership community. First, it's in preparing to take on a big job. Sometimes you're about to transition into a role, or you're the heir apparent, or you've taken the final steps to position yourself for the next role in the organization, and both you and others who have influence are likely thinking you're going to step into that. And it isn't always the case, but most of the time, it's a bigger role, and it requires a different skill set than the one you have today. The second way this shows up is a recent transition into a new role or a new position or a big new scope of work, and you've discovered, as most of us do when taking on something new, that it's a different skill set that's needed there too. And often, when it's a bigger role especially, it's an entirely different scope of focus, and it's also a different altitude that you're showing up in your thinking and strategy. And the last way it shows up is not in a role change at all, but you've noticed that there's an opportunity to unlock a bunch more. Sometimes, that's because something changed around you in a pretty significant way, and sometimes, it's because you've done a great job building yourself up in the capacity, in the recent past in your work, and you're ready to challenge yourself with something more. In all three of those situations, it's shifting how you do things. And almost always, especially here in our community, most of that comes down to how you're working with people. It's not really so much the technical or clinical or academic training that you've had anymore, at least. Most leaders in our listening community have a good solid knowledge base or experience in their fields and expertise doing the things that they need to do as individual contributors earlier on and in the roles that they've been in. And many people who come to our Academy have teams of five to ten direct reports, and a ton of the work is now about enabling those people to be successful and growing your capacity with people and behaviors, both, of course, the behaviors of others and your own. And just like Marshall Goldsmith wrote in his bestselling book, what got you here won't get you there. So the Academy is an intimate group of peer leaders led personally by me that work together for eight months to help each other thrive through those inflection points. And we have applications open now until this Friday, September 11th. You can get all the details at coachingforleaders.com/academy.

And of course, I've been talking to applicants over this past week about this question a lot, which again is, what helps leaders get the most success out of the Academy? And by the way, again, the bigger question, just success in general, how do you thrive, especially at some of these bigger inflection points in our careers? And as I said a moment ago, I think a lot of this comes down to four words, and the four words come in pairs. Here are the first two words, show up. Now, when I say show up, I don't just mean being physically there. That's of course essential, but that's really a given for most leaders, especially people in our community. They're doing that well. When I say show up, I mean in your willingness to put things into action. When I see leaders do this well, here's some of the things that I see. First of all, they regularly do stuff that's a little bit scary. There's an old adage that a good professional development plan is to do one thing every day that scares you. I found that to be a pretty instrumental way in seeing people and leaders move forward too. The thing about leadership is that of course it's scary, because it's broad, it's complex, it requires a ton of different kinds of skills. And that means that nobody is great at everything that we need to do in order to lead well. So that means a bit of fear coming into the work for almost all of us. Getting better at leadership means trying something each day that's a little bit scary. An emphasis by the way on that being a little scary. Leaders I know who really nail this figure out something they can do each day that nudges them forward just a bit and they do it really consistently. I read a book from Susan Jeffers about 25 years ago called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. The best leaders I know are great, especially at that last part, the do it anyway. They don't have any less fear. They just don't let it stop them. Showing up also means a willingness to accept some awkwardness.